Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education
Showing 1-10 of 83 Results
-
Kristian Ayala
Ph.D. Student in English, admitted Autumn 2019
Graduate Students in COLLEGE, Stanford Introductory Studies OperationsBioI’m very interested in how people generate good ideas, both in writing and speaking. In the classroom, my goal is to show you that good ideas don’t just appear in our heads, as if thanks to some innate power. Rather, good ideas come from methodical thinking. Good ideas, in fact, can come from thinking with rhetorical figures. The next time you’re struggling to explain something to a friend, use a simile. What is something your friend already knows? Try making a comparison with that familiar thing. Rhetorical figures are not just stylish dress for sentences. They’re useful, like a flashlight when the power goes out.
Trained in an English department, I am a rhetorician working at the intersections of stylistics and argumentation. Powered by humanistic methods, my scholarship focuses on invention, especially updating the art of topical invention. In my current book, I offer a theory of rhetorical figures defined as epitomes of the dialectical topics, an old tradition of informal logic. My theory of the figures challenges our notion of creativity, which is currently too reliant on individualistic achievement.
A revamped theory of the figures powers my criticism. As part of my research program, I work on literary and rhetorical traditions in US American and Latinx contexts. My book presents a case study along these lines: I explain the informal logic of some Latinx nostalgia between the World Wars. For a sample of my research program, see my article in the forthcoming special issue of Pasados: Recovering Histories, Imagining Latinidad.
Before coming to COLLEGE, I taught courses in literary studies and in liberal-arts general education. Before that, I taught high school in Chicago and New York City. -
Kim Beil
Lecturer, Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture
BioKim Beil is an art historian who specializes in the history of photography. Her book, Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography, looks at 50 stylistic trends in the medium since the 19th century. Recently she’s written for the New York Times about tracking down an Ansel Adams photograph in the High Sierra with a team of astronomers. She’s also written about photography and climate change for The Atlantic, a survey of street views for Cabinet, and a history of screenshots for the Believer. She also writes frequently about modern and contemporary art for Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, Photograph, and Sculpture magazines.
-
Altair Brandon-Salmon
Lecturer, Civic, Liberal, and Global Education
BioAltair Brandon-Salmon is a lecturer in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) programme. He is an art historian writing a book on how bombsites shaped British art and architecture during the twentieth century. More broadly, he focuses on British and American art which is intertwined with violence, memory, and mortality.
His scholarship has been published by Art History, Art Journal, and the Oxford Art Journal, written exhibition catalogue essays for the Cantor Arts Center and the Museum Barberini, and given lectures at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the University of York, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. His essays have appeared in America, Commonweal, Literary Review, and Public Seminar, while his fiction has been published by The Isis and the Oxford Review of Books. He is currently editing a volume for the Roxburghe Club on the eighteenth-century antiquarian, archaeologist, and Jacobite dissident James Byres.
Brandon-Salmon was the assistant curator at Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and the curatorial assistant at the Sheldonian Theatre.
He is represented by Orli Vogt-Vincent at David Higham Associates.
Education
Ph.D., Stanford University, Art History (2024)
M.St., Christ Church, University of Oxford, History of Art (2019)
B.A., Wadham College, University of Oxford, History of Art (2018) -
Caitlin Brust
Lecturer, Civic, Liberal, and Global Education
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCaitlin studies educational justice both philosophically and empirically, exploring what constitutes (un)just epistemic environments in U.S. higher education and how educators, students, and institutions themselves can resist various forms of epistemic injustice within these environments. Her interdisciplinary research draws from feminist and social epistemology, liberal and democratic education, and ethical and political theory; she also uses qualitative methods to explore how college students and educators identify as knowers and navigate relations of knowledge, identity, and power in the liberal arts seminar classroom. Alongside arguments about formal teaching and learning practices, she studies the essential role of academic mentorship in undergraduate and graduate student life.
