School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 61-70 of 89 Results
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Helen Quinn
Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, Emerita
BioHelen Quinn received her Ph.D in physics at Stanford in 1967. She has taught physics at both Harvard and Stanford. Dr. Quinn work as a particle physicist has been honored by the Dirac Medal (from the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Italy) and the Klein Medal (from The Swedish National Academy of Sciences and Stockholm University) as well as the Sakurai Prize (from the American Physical Society), the Compton medal (from the American Institute of Physics, awarded once every 4 years) and the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics (from the Franklin Institute). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Science and the American Philosophical Society. She is a Fellow and former president of the American Physical Society. She is originally from Australia and is an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia.
Dr. Quinn has been active in science education for some years, and since her retirement in 2010 this has been her major activity. She was a founding member of the Contemporary Physics Education Project (CPEP) which produced a well-known standard-model poster for schools in 1987 (see photo). She served as Chair of the US National Academy of Sciences Board on Science Education (BOSE) from 2009-2014. She was as a member of the BOSE study committee that developed the report “Taking Science to School” and chaired the committee for the “Framework for K-12 Science Education”, which is the basis of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and similar standards now adopted by about 30 states in the US, and has been influential internationally as well. She also contributed to follow-up NRC studies on assessment and implementation of NGSS. From 2015-2018 Helen served at the request of the President of Ecuador as a member of the “Comision Gestora” to help plan and guide the initial development of the National University of Education of Ecuador. -
Joan Ramon Resina
Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and of Comparative Literature
BioProfessor Resina has authored thirteen books, most recently Luchino Visconti. Filmmaker and Philosopher. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. The book focuses on the director’s German Trilogy —The Damned (1969) Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1972). This set of films is thematically unified through the exploration of decadence, combining a stunning aesthetic with philosophical implications. The book traces the philosophical themes, relating them to dominant currents of thought and sensibility in the periods under representation.
Resina is also the author of The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society. Liverpool University Press, 2017. This book is a reflection on the political use of historical memory focusing on the case of Spain. It analyses the philosophical implications of the transference of the notion of memory from the individual consciousness to the collective subject and considers the conflation of epistemology with ethics. A subtheme is the origin and transmission of political violence and its endurance in the form of “negationism”. The book engages controversial issues, such as the relation between memory and imputation, the obstacles to reconciliation, and the problems arising from the existence of not only different but also conflicting memories about the past. Another book from the same year is Josep Pla: The World Seen in the Form of Articles. Toronto University Press, 2017, which received the North American Catalan Society award for best book on Catalan Studies in 2019. This book condenses Pla's 47-volume work into 11 thematic units devoted to a central aspect of Pla's oeuvre. Resina explores the modalities of Pla's writing: stylistic, phenomenological, political, his relation to language, fiction, food, and landscape, and his approach to sexuality, women, and death. It introduces the reader to the colorful world of Catalonia's greatest 20th century prose writer through the author's gaze. Pla was a privileged observer of some of the crucial events of the 20th century, but he also captured the sensual infrastructure of his own country by recording every aspect of its reality.
Previous books include Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009. In this book, Resina lays out the rationale for the overcoming of Hispanic Studies by a new discipline of Iberian Studies, contending that the field's response to the crisis of the Humanities should not lie in the retrenchment into the national philological traditions. Another publication since joining Stanford is Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (Stanford UP, 2008). This book traces the development of Barcelona's modern image since the late 19th century through the 20th century through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. The book ends with a highly critical view on the post-Olympic period.
Resina has edited thirteen collections of essays on varied topics, most recently, What to do with ruins? Contemporary uses of ruination. Liverpool University Press, 2025. He has published extensively in specialized journals, such as PMLA, MLN, New Literary History, Modern Language Quarterly, and Angelaki, and has contributed to a large number of critical volumes. From 1999 to 2005 he was the Editor of Diacritics. For many years he has been a regular contributor to the Barcelona daily press. He has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Northwestern University, as well as visiting appointments at foreign universities, and received awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt and the Fullbright fellowships, and a fellowship at the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Cologne. He has been distinguished with the Cross of St. George, one of the highest awards bestowed by the Government of Catalonia. -
John Rick
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus
BioJohn Rick’s research focuses on prehistoric archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers and initial hierarchical societies, stone tool analysis and digital methodologies, Latin America, Southwestern U.S. Rick’s major research efforts have included long-term projects studying early hunting societies of the high altitude puna grasslands of central Peru, and currently he directs a major research project at the monumental World Heritage site of Chavín de Huántar aimed at exploring the foundations of authority in the central Andes. Other field projects include work on early agricultural villages in the American Southwest, and a recently-initiated project on the Preclassic and Early Classic archaeology of the Guatemalan highlands near Panajachel, Atitlan. Current emphasis is on employing dimensional analytical digital techniques to the study of landscape and architecture, and on exploring the contexts and motivations for the development of sociopolitical inequalities.
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John Rickford
J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a variationist sociolinguist (someone who studies language variation, often quantitatively, in relation to society and culture). I’m interested in understanding the relations between language variation, social structure and meaning, and language change, from descriptive, theoretical and applied perspectives.
A lot of my work has been devoted to understanding the linguistic, social and stylistic constraints on specific linguistic variables, like the variation between Guyanese pronouns am, she, and her in “e like am” (deep creole, basilect) versus “e like she” (intermediate creole, mesolect) versus “He likes her” (standard English, acrolect). Or, to take an American example, the variation between all and like as quotative introducers in “He’s all/like ‘I don’t know’.” But I’ve also been concerned with trying to figure out where such variables come from historically, and whether they represent ongoing or completed change. I’ve also used the data from specific variables to address larger methodological and theoretical concepts in sociolinguistics, like how best to conceptualize the speech community and analyze linguistic variation by social class and ethnicity, or to assess the role of addressee versus topic in style shifting or the validity of the hyothesis that linguistic and social constraints are essentially independent (in their effects, not frequencies).
My data come primarily from English-based creoles of the Caribbean (especially my native Guyanese Creole, but also Jamaican and Barbadian) and from colloquial American English (especially African American Vernacular English, but also, recently, from computer corpora, like Google newsgroup data). I’ve also been interested, increasingly since the 1990s, in how sociolinguistic research can be applied to help us understand and overcome the challenges that vernacular and creole speakers face in schools, where standard/mainstream varieties are expected. -
Jonathan Rosa
Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Linguistics, of Anthropology and of Comparative Literature
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am currently working on two book projects through which I am continuing to develop frameworks for understanding ethnoracial, linguistic, and educational formations. The first examines racial reckonings across distinctive societal contexts by interweaving ethnographic analysis of diasporic Puerto Rican experiences and broader constructions of Latinidad that illustrate race and ethnicity as colonial and communicative predicaments. The second spotlights decolonial approaches to the creation of collective well-being through educational and societal transformations based on longstanding community collaborations in Chicago.
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Michael Rosenfeld
Professor of Sociology
BioI am a social demographer who studies race, ethnicity, and family structure, the family's effect on children, and the history of the family. I am interested in mate selection as a social as well as a personal process.
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Elizabeth Sáenz-Ackermann
Associate Director, Center for Latin American Studies
Current Role at StanfordElizabeth provides administrative leadership for the Center. She oversees Center programming, administering various fellowship and grant programs and visiting professorships, including a U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center grant, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, and the Tinker Visiting Professorship. She directs undergraduate and graduate degree programs, manages the Center’s budget, fundraising, and outreach, and supervises the administrative staff. She supports and advises the Director in developing and setting program priorities, in policy and decision making, in liaising with other units on campus, and in representing the Center on and off campus. She serves as an academic advisor for LAS degree candidates and co-teaches the LAS graduate writing seminar.
