Stanford University


Showing 341-350 of 1,398 Results

  • Amir Eshel

    Amir Eshel

    Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature

    BioAmir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.

    Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).

    Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.

    Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.

    Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.

  • John Evans

    John Evans

    Lecturer

    BioJohn W. Evans is the author of The Fight Journal (Rattle, 2023), Should I Still Wish: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Young Widower: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and The Consolations: Poems (Trio House Press, 2014).

    His books have won prizes including the Rattle Chapbook Prize, the River Teeth Book Prize, the Peace Corps Writers Book Prize, a ForeWord Reviews Book Prize, the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and the Trio Award. Should I Still Wish was selected by Poets and Writers magazine as a “new and noteworthy” title of January/February 2017, and is published in the American Lives Series.

    His work appears or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review (2016 Editor’s Prize Finalist), Poets & Writers, Slate, Boston Review, The Southern Review, New Letters, ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, The Flyfish Journal, Pangyrus, and Best American Essays 2011 (Honorable Mention), as well as the chapbooks, No Season (FWQ, 2011) and Zugzwang (RockSaw, 2009).

    John was previously the Phyllis Draper Lecturer in Nonfiction at Stanford University, where he is also the Lecturer of DCI Memoir. He was previously a Jones Lecturer and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. At Stanford, John has been recognized as a “favorite professor” by the women’s basketball, water polo, field hockey, and volleyball teams, as well as the Knight Fellows and the DCI Fellows. He lives with his three young sons in East Palo Alto, where he serves on the board of the local YMCA.

  • Judith Ellen Fan

    Judith Ellen Fan

    Assistant Professor of Psychology, by courtesy, of Education and of Computer Science

    BioI direct the Cognitive Tools Lab (https://cogtoolslab.github.io/) at Stanford University. Our lab aims to reverse engineer the human cognitive toolkit—in particular, how people use physical representations of thought to learn, communicate, and solve problems. Toward this end, we use a combination of approaches from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to achieve deeper understanding of quintessentially human ways of thinking and imagining. Our broader goal is to leverage such scientific understanding of human cognition to guide the development of technologies that augment human agency and creativity.

  • Shanhui Fan

    Shanhui Fan

    Joseph and Hon Mai Goodman Professor of the School of Engineering, Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and Professor, by courtesy, of Applied Physics

    BioFan's research interests are in fundamental studies of nanophotonic structures, especially photonic crystals and meta-materials, and applications of these structures in energy and information technology applications

  • Michael Fayer

    Michael Fayer

    David Mulvane Ehrsam and Edward Curtis Franklin Professor of Chemistry

    BioMy research group studies complex molecular systems by using ultrafast multi-dimensional infrared and non-linear UV/Vis methods. A basic theme is to understand the role of mesoscopic structure on the properties of molecular systems. Many systems have structure on length scales large compare to molecules but small compared to macroscopic dimensions. The mesoscopic structures occur on distance scales of a few nanometers to a few tens of nanometers. The properties of systems, such as water in nanoscopic environments, room temperature ionic liquids, functionalized surfaces, liquid crystals, metal organic frameworks, water and other liquids in nanoporous silica, polyelectrolyte fuel cell membranes, vesicles, and micelles depend on molecular level dynamics and intermolecular interactions. Our ultrafast measurements provide direct observables for understanding the relationships among dynamics, structure, and intermolecular interactions.

    Bulk properties are frequently a very poor guide to understanding the molecular level details that determine the nature of a chemical process and its dynamics. Because molecules are small, molecular motions are inherently very fast. Recent advances in methodology developed in our labs make it possible for us to observe important processes as they occur. These measurements act like stop-action photography. To focus on a particular aspect of a time evolving system, we employ sequences of ultrashort pulses of light as the basis for non-linear methods such as ultrafast infrared two dimensional vibrational echoes, optical Kerr effect methods, and ultrafast IR transient absorption experiments.

    We are using ultrafast 2D IR vibrational echo spectroscopy and other multi-dimensional IR methods, which we have pioneered, to study dynamics of molecular complexes, water confined on nm lengths scales with a variety of topographies, molecules bound to surfaces, ionic liquids, and materials such as metal organic frameworks and porous silica. We can probe the dynamic structures these systems. The methods are somewhat akin to multidimensional NMR, but they probe molecular structural evolution in real time on the relevant fast time scales, eight to ten orders of magnitude faster than NMR. We are obtaining direct information on how nanoscopic confinement of water changes its properties, a topic of great importance in chemistry, biology, geology, and materials. For the first time, we are observing the motions of molecular bound to surfaces. In biological membranes, we are using the vibrational echo methods to study dynamics and the relationship among dynamics, structure, and function. We are also developing and applying theory to these problems frequently in collaboration with top theoreticians.

    We are studying dynamics in complex liquids, in particular room temperature ionic liquids, liquid crystals, supercooled liquids, as well as in influence of small quantities of water on liquid dynamics. Using ultrafast optical heterodyne detected optical Kerr effect methods, we can follow processes from tens of femtoseconds to ten microseconds. Our ability to look over such a wide range of time scales is unprecedented. The change in molecular dynamics when a system undergoes a phase change is of fundamental and practical importance. We are developing detailed theory as the companion to the experiments.

    We are studying photo-induced proton transfer in nanoscopic water environments such as polyelectrolyte fuel cell membranes, using ultrafast UV/Vis fluorescence and multidimensional IR measurements to understand the proton transfer and other processes and how they are influenced by nanoscopic confinement. We want to understand the role of the solvent and the systems topology on proton transfer dynamics.