Stanford University


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  • Izabela Morska

    Izabela Morska

    Vscp Visiting Scholar, H & S Programs

    BioIzabela Morska is a Polish scholar and writer, Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Gdańsk. Her research examines civic ethics, pluralism, and the cultural imaginaries of democracy, with particular attention to borderlands, migration, and the narrative forms through which political communities understand themselves. Her current work on Paweł Adamowicz—long serving mayor of Gdańsk and a prominent advocate of urban solidarity—situates his assassination in January 2019 within broader questions of civic responsibility, humanitarianism, and democratic resilience in contemporary Europe. She holds an MA from the University of Gdańsk, a PhD from the Polish Academy of Sciences, and an MFA from Mills College.

    Morska has held research appointments at Humanities Institute University College Dublin, the Open Society Archives at Central European University Budapest, the Russian Institute for Advanced Study in Moscow, and the Beatrice Bain Research Group at UC Berkeley. She is the author of fifteen books across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and criticism, including Glorious Outlaws: Debt as a Tool in Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction (2016), and her work has been recognized with the Julian Tuwim Literary Award for lifetime achievement (2019). Her teaching and writing engage American political imaginaries, embodiment narratives, postcolonial and subaltern studies, LGBTQ+ literature and culture, and creative nonfiction.

    Her recent projects include a Polish Ministry of Culture grant for The Legacy of Paweł Adamowicz and a multi year research initiative on violence in the media.

    At CREEES Stanford she is going to explore civic ethics, border imaginaries, and the cultural narratives that frame staged and performative violence, examining how extremist discourses in Eastern Europe contribute to stochastic forms of political hostility and how these dynamics resonate with the narrative patterns she has identified in the Adamowicz case, including tensions between Hanseatic urban revival and nationalistic backlash.

  • Negar Mottahedeh

    Negar Mottahedeh

    Visiting Professor, Iranian Studies

    BioI am a cultural critic and theorist specializing in interdisciplinary contributions to the fields of Middle Eastern Studies and Film & Media Studies. I have published five books on Iranian Cinema, the history of reform, revolution and the uses of various media in protest. My book "#iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life" (Stanford University Press, 2015) is about one such social media mobilization. "#iranelection" follows the protest movement around Iran's fraudulent presidential election in 2009 to investigate how the emerging social media platforms of the era developed as a result of the international solidarity around the hashtag. Just as the world turned to social media platforms to understand the events on the ground, social media platforms adapted and developed to accommodate global activism. "#iranelection" reveals the new online ecology of social protest and offers a prehistory, of sorts, to the uses of hashtags and trending topics, of selfies and avatar activism, citizen journalism and YouTube mashups.

    My most recent book Whisper Tapes: Kate Millett in Iran (Stanford UP, 2019) which was translated into Persian and published by Naakojaa Press in 2026 draws on The Kate Millett papers in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History & Culture in the Duke archives to recover the lost history of the women’s protests that followed quickly on the heels of Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascent to power as the leader of the Iranian Revolution. Less than a month after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the American feminist Kate Millett traveled to Tehran to join Iranian women in a celebration of International Women’s Day. As the celebration turned into six days of demonstrations, Millett’s picture appeared in major International newspapers as a participant. She was pictured holding a small tape recorder. These tapes, Millett’s “whisper tapes,” captured the soundscape of a flickering (and unfettered) moment of revolutionary vitality that spawned imaginative narratives and theories among feminists around the world. As I listened to Millett's audio tapes and in between the often contradictory layering of voices and sounds captured on them, I began writing the Whisper Tapes as a playful interpretive guide for Millett in retrospect – a guide to the demands of postrevolutionary Iran in 32 entries following the 32 letters of the Persian alphabet, introducing the reader to the Revolution’s slogans, its habits, its instincts, its foods, its monuments, its collectivism, its cast of characters and importantly to the Iranian women’s movement—a movement some have claimed Millett herself never quite grasped.

    Here's a link to the book in Persian translation:
    https://shorturl.at/1pEBa

  • Paula M. L. Moya

    Paula M. L. Moya

    Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies and of Iberian and Latin American Cultures

    BioMoya is currently the Ellen Andrews Wright Internal Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where she is on leave for AY 2025-2026.

    She is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002). She has co-edited three collections of original essays including Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006) and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000). 

    Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, speculative fiction, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicano/a and U.S. Latina/o studies.

    At Stanford, Moya has served as the Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), Vice Chair of the Department of English, and the Director of the Undergraduate Program of CCSRE. She has been the faculty coordinator of several faculty-graduate student research networks sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the Research Institute for the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Modern Thought and Literature. They include The Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory (2015-2016, 2012-2014), Feminist Theory (2007-08, 2002-03), Americanity / Coloniality / Modernity (2006-07), and How Do Identities Matter? (2003-06).

    Moya was a co-PI of the Stanford Catalyst Motivating Mobility project, and team leader of the Perfecto Project, a fitness tracking app that combines narrative theory, social psychology, and UI/UX research to leverage culturally-specific narratives and artwork to encourage positive behavior change and healthier living in middle-aged and elderly Latinx populations. She was also a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society.

    Moya has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a Ford Foundation posdoctoral fellow. She has also been the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and an Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award.

  • Michaela Mross

    Michaela Mross

    Associate Professor of Religious Studies

    BioMichaela Mross specializes in Japanese Buddhism, with a particular emphasis on Sōtō Zen, Buddhist rituals, sacred music, as well as manuscript and print culture in premodern Japan. She has written numerous articles on kōshiki 講式 (Buddhist ceremonials) and co-edited a special issue of the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies on kōshiki. Her first book, Memory, Music, Manuscripts: The Ritual Dynamics of Kōshiki in Japanese Sōtō Zen, is forthcoming with the Kuroda Series of University of Hawai’i Press. She is currently working on a monograph on eisanka 詠讃歌 (Buddhist hymns) and lay Buddhist choirs in contemporary Zen Buddhism. This project will showcase how music played a vital role in the modernization of Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhism in the last seventy years.