Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education
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Joseph Kidney
COLLEGE Lecturer
BioJoseph Kidney is a Lecturer for Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). He received a PhD in English Literature from Stanford University in 2024. An early modernist, his work looks at sixteenth-century literature, particularly drama, against the backdrop of the European and English Reformations. His dissertation examined the sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory projects of Reformation and Renaissance as they drastically reshaped intellectual culture and gave rise to new forms of vernacular literature. In this project and elsewhere, he has a particular interest in classical reception, rhetorical theory, early modern humanism, Renaissance comedy, and the cultural transformations regarding attitudes to the dead.
His academic publications include work on the dramatists Nicholas Udall, William Shakespeare, and John Webster, drawing on early modern thought ranging from theology to proto-scientific treatises. Other work supplements these historicist approaches with twentieth- and twenty-first-century methodologies derived from queer theory, considerations of metatheatre, and genre theory. He has also published on pedagogy, articulating strategies for teaching old plays in modern classrooms. He has taught, as instructor of record, classes on Shakespeare and on Renaissance Literature, and served as a teaching assistant for literary surveys from Beowulf to Jane Austen, as well as for Poetry and Poetics. He has worked as an assistant editor for the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia and as a Graduate Coordinator for Stanford's Renaissances working group.
Outside of academia, he has received numerous awards for poetry, including, most recently, the Grand Prize in Arc Poetry Magazine's Poem of the Year contest. His poems have appeared, among other places, in Best Canadian Poetry 2024 and been nominated for a National Magazine Award. A full length debut will appear in March 2025. -
Elias Kleinbock
SLE Lecturer
BioElias Kleinbock is a Lecturer in the Program in Structured Liberal Education (SLE), a first-year residential humanities program at Stanford University.
His research brings modernist cultural production in the German, Soviet, and Anglophone spheres into conversation with the history of the human sciences and the intersecting traditions of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Spinozism. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, with a dissertation titled “Labors of Formation: Pedagogy and Collectivity in the Modernist Frame.” His current book project, based on his dissertation, traces out a transindividual, psychosocial conception of teaching and learning in works by 20th-century thinkers including Aleksandr Bogdanov, John Dewey, Bertolt Brecht, and Wilfred R. Bion. Elias's broader interests include poetry and poetics, experimental cinema, pre-Freudian histories of the unconscious, and aesthetic and theoretical treatments of impersonality and theatricality. He is also an amateur theater practitioner, with experience and training in clown, commedia, and Lecoq-style physical theater. -
Elaine Lai
COLLEGE Lecturer
BioElaine Lai is a Lecturer for Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) who has spent over a decade of her life working and studying in Nepal, Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, and China, where she made many lifelong friends.
Elaine is a scholar of Buddhism, trained in the languages of Tibetan, Chinese, and Sanskrit. She specializes in a tradition known as the Great Perfection in Tibet. Elaine’s recent research explores the relationship between Buddhist literature and time, specifically, how form and content interplay to cultivate more compassionate temporal relationalities. Elaine is committed to making the study of Buddhism accessible to a wider audience through technology and the arts. As a part of her dissertation, she created an intertextual heatmap to trace the citational history of a scripture throughout an important corpus of Great Perfection literature. Elaine also created a virtual reality (VR) experience to present Great Perfection history in a novel way.
At Stanford, Elaine has co-taught different courses in Religious Studies and guest lectured in Asian American Studies. In 2022, Elaine is proud to have created and taught the course “Queering Buddhism: Gender, Sexuality, and Liberatory Praxis.” This course sought to investigate the possibilities and constraints to “queering” or transforming any institution, and how the fields of queer studies and feminist studies might constructively and ethically be in conversation with Buddhist theories of liberation. In her pedagogy, Elaine emphasizes the importance of reciprocity, respect, and co-creation. Elaine is a firm believer that the process of how we engage in dialogue is as important, if not more important, than what the ultimate outcome of our conversations might be.
In Elaine’s free time, she writes screenplays (film and TV), spanning the genres of comedy, sci-fi, animation, historical drama, and more. -
Lina Le
Academic Affairs Administrator, Stanford Introductory Studies Operations
BioLina is an Academic Affairs Administrator with Stanford Introductory Studies (SIS), under the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE). She manages hiring and payments for instructors and faculty teaching in SIS programs. Prior to SIS, Lina was with the Diversity & Access Office providing students, staff, faculty and visitors disability-related accommodations and supporting the 8 staff affinity groups. She has also worked at the Graduate School of Business, helping MBA and MSx students acclimate to living on campus. Lina has a Bachelor's in Business Administration from San Jose State University and a Master's in Global Entrepreneurial Management from the University of San Francisco.
