Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education


Showing 1-87 of 87 Results

  • Christine Alfano

    Christine Alfano

    Senior Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Digital Rhetoric, Rhetoric of Gaming, Visual Rhetoric, Gender and Technology, Writing Program Administration

  • Doree Allen

    Doree Allen

    Senior Lecturer in Oral Communication at the Center for Teaching and Learning

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPoetics of the performed text, voice and gender, leadership communication, speaking in museum settings, pedagogy of aesthetic development, Readers' Theatre, healing and the arts, the rhetoric of stage presence

  • Mutallip Anwar

    Mutallip Anwar

    Lecturer

    BioMutallip Anwar completed his PhD in Language & Rhetoric at the University of Washington. Prior to joining PWR, he taught college writing courses at the University of Washington and Highline College. His primary teaching and research interests include rhetoric and composition studies, language education, discourse analysis, and translation.

  • David Armenta

    David Armenta

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioDavid Armenta is a lecturer for the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) program. He earned his bachelor's degree in molecular and cellular biology from Harvard University. Working as an undergraduate intern in the lab of Andrew Murray, he studied mechanisms underlying evolution and adaptation in budding yeast. Next, he earned his PhD in biology (cells, molecules, and organisms track) from Stanford University, working with Scott Dixon to study how amino acid metabolism regulates sensitivity of cancer cells to the nonapoptotic cell death mechanism of ferroptosis.

  • Ruth Averbach

    Ruth Averbach

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioRuth Averbach is a Teaching Fellow in the Program for Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University. Her dissertation, "Writing Women: Gender, Representation, and Alterity in Russian Realism," examines why male authors passionately took up the cause of women's rights in mid-19th century Russia. Ruth is currently writing a book on author and memoirist Alexander Alexandrov, commonly misnamed as Nadezhda Durova, which examines the author's transmasculine identity and his social reception among his contemporaries. The first chapter, "The (Un)Making of a Man," is available in article form in the Fall 2022 issue of Slavic Review.

  • Kim Beil

    Kim Beil

    ITALIC Associate Director

    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.

  • Tony Boutelle

    Tony Boutelle

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioTony Boutelle teaches in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) program. He earned a B.S. in Biology with a second major in Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During his time at Chapel Hill, he conducted undergraduate research in the Alisa Wolberg Lab, studying the biochemistry of blood clotting and completing an honors thesis entitled "Investigating the binding interaction between human factor XIII and fibrinogen". Motivated to continue conducting research to understand biological processes that impact human health, he went on to complete a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, studying cancer genetics and cell biology in the Laura Attardi Lab. His dissertation, entitled "Understanding tumor suppression through the p53 target gene network", focused on illuminating the downstream effectors of the potent tumor suppressor, p53, and the molecular and cellular mechanisms important for tumor suppression.

    Tony discovered his love for teaching as a supplemental instructor for "Principles of Biology" during his Junior and Senior years at UNC. At Stanford he served as a graduate teaching assistant for "Molecular and Genetic Basis of Cancer" and "Cancer Biology" and took on mentoring and outreach roles with various programs including REACH, GRIPS, PIPS, the Ashanti Project, EXPLORE, SIMR, Hermanxs in STEM, and Stanford SPLASH. Tony enjoys exploring the intersection of the "hard" sciences with other disciplines such as religion, philosophy, literature, etc. Through teaching, Tony hopes to create spaces that encourage students and instructors alike to gain the skills and confidence to create a meaningful life for themselves and to shape communities that promote human flourishing.

    In his free time, find Tony bird watching, baking, playing a board game, or trying a new food.

  • Shaleen Brawn

    Shaleen Brawn

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Rhetoric of Science and Technology, Science Communication, Publishing as Process and Institution

  • Nissa Ren Cannon

    Nissa Ren Cannon

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research focuses on transatlantic modernism, citizenship, and print culture. My book project, which was chosen for the 2019 Penn State First Book Institute, argues that the bureaucratic and literary documents of interwar itinerancy–including passports, travel ephemera, and newspapers–shape expatriation as a distinct mode of national belonging.

  • Laura Joyce Davis

    Laura Joyce Davis

    Lecturer

    BioLaura Joyce Davis teaches podcasting at Stanford University, where she helps students turn climate change research into planet-saving stories, and manages production for the award-winning State of the Human. She is the CEO and cofounder of Narrative Podcasts, the Executive Producer of Shelter in Place, and a Podcast Magazine Top Influencer in Podcasting. Her work has been recognized with a Social Impact Award for Mentoring and DEI initiatives, a Fulbright scholarship, a Poet & Writers Exchange Award, and the International Women’s Podcasting Award for “Changing the World One Moment at a Time.”

  • Tara Dosumu Diener

    Tara Dosumu Diener

    PWR Lecturer

    BioTara received a Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan in 2016 and a Graduate Certificate in Science, Technology, and Society in 2014. Prior to graduate studies at Michigan, she practiced as a Registered Nurse in obstetrics and pediatrics while earning an M.A. in Bioethics, Humanities, and Society from the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences (CEHLS) at Michigan State University. She has taught courses in creative non-fiction writing, medical, biological, and sociocultural anthropology, international and African studies, global health, political science, and the history of medicine in the US, Western Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. She is an anthropologist and historian of medicine, maternal and infant health and mortality, global health (non)systems, and nursing ethics and practice. She is proficient in both archival and ethnographic methods and her previous projects have focused on the United Kingdom and Sierra Leone.

  • Kevin DiPirro

    Kevin DiPirro

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Rhetoric of Performance; Multimodal Presentation; Devised Theatre; Art and Technology

  • Erik Ellis

    Erik Ellis

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Multimodal Composition, Visual Rhetoric, The Essay, Style, Picture Books

  • Norah Fahim

    Norah Fahim

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Digital Rhetoric, Narrative Inquiry, Writing Program Administration, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, and Second Language Writing

  • Lindsey Felt

    Lindsey Felt

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: 20th and 21st Century American Literature, Disability Studies, Media Culture, Science and Technology Studies, Graphic Narrative, Digital Humanities, Posthumanism.

  • Megan Formato

    Megan Formato

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: History of Science and Technology; Rhetoric of Science; Literature and Science; Science and Technology Studies; Scientific Writing Practices; Women and Science; Revision Practices

  • Thomas Freeland

    Thomas Freeland

    Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Theatre (Shakespeare, German Theatre, Shakespeare in German); Critical Theory, Literature in Translation, German Literature, History of the American West, European History, Political Science

  • Mark Gardiner

    Mark Gardiner

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Social and Cultural Anthropology, African Studies, Environmental Justice, Race, Critical Science and Technology Studies, Politics, Institutions, International Development

  • Alexander Greenhough

    Alexander Greenhough

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSpecialization: Film Theory; Film History; Postwar European and American Cinema; Contemporary New Zealand Cinema

  • Esiteli Hafoka

    Esiteli Hafoka

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    Bio'Esiteli Hafoka received her PhD and MA in Religious Studies from Stanford University, and her BA in Religious Studies and Ancient History from UC Riverside. Her research introduces a novel theoretical approach, Angafakafonua as Tongan epistemology, to understand Tongan collective identity in America. Her dissertation identifies religious threads connecting 19th c. Methodist Christianity, Mormonism, Tongan Crip Gang members in Utah, and sacred education spaces to reveal the ways Tongans navigate their racial identity in America through a religious epistemology. She has co-authored a chapter with Finau Sina Tovo titled, "Mana as Sacred Space: A Talanoa of Tongan American College Students in a Pacific Studies Learning Community Classroom" in Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies, NYU Press 2023.

    'Esiteli is the proud daughter of Taniela and Latufuipeka (Hala'ufia) Hafoka, wife of Va'inga Uhamaka, and mother of Sinakilea and Latufuipeka.

  • Katelyn Hansen-McKown

    Katelyn Hansen-McKown

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioKatelyn is a Lecturer in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) program. She earned a B.S. in Biology at Stanford and completed an honors thesis on her research in the Fire Lab using the nematode C. elegans to examine metal toxicity in the presence of the chelator, glyphosate. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Genetics from the Stanford School of Medicine, studying stomatal development in the temperate grass model and smaller relative to wheat, Brachypodium distachyon, in the Bergmann Lab. Stomata are pores on the surfaces of leaves that regulate gas and water exchange. They are essential in managing the plant’s nutrient circulation, temperature, and water use efficiency, and therefore have important implications for drought tolerance. Katelyn’s research focused on characterizing members of a well-conserved transcription factor family involved in stomatal differentiation using genetic approaches to understand how grasses’ unique stomata are formed, including the creation of cross-species rescues to test for functional conservation across monocots and dicots.

    Katelyn is also passionate about science communication and teaching, and has organized science outreach events through outlets such as Stanford’s Splash, Taste of Science, and Nightlife at the Cal Academy; tutored at the Hume Writing Center and for the Biology honors thesis writing class; and served as an Indigenous research mentor for first year Native students in Frosh Fellows. When she’s not in the lab or classroom, Katelyn can be found gardening, fishing, playing board games, or exploring the great outdoors.

  • Shannon Hervey

    Shannon Hervey

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Cold War Literature and Culture, Popular American Literature and Culture, Young Adult Literature, Posthumanism, the Digital Humanities, Writing Pedagogy, and Multimodal Composition

  • Randall Holmes

    Randall Holmes

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioAfter completing service in the U.S. Army, Randall transferred into Stanford University where he completed a BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Atmosphere and Energy track, as well as a master’s degree in Earth System Science. Randall is currently working toward his PhD in Stanford’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER). Randall is considering research on the implementation of California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, with specific interests in geochemical processes that afffect groundwater quality, water policy, and adaptive management with Prof. Scott Fendorf and Prof. Leon Szeptycki.

  • Melissa A. Hosek

    Melissa A. Hosek

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioMelissa A. Hosek earned her Ph.D. in Chinese from the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. She specializes in modern Chinese literature with interests in environmental humanities, STS (science, technology, and society), and the digital humanities. Her dissertation, "The Ecological Imagination: Nature, Technology, and Criticism in Chinese Science Fiction: 1976-Today," examines how modern Chinese eco-perspectives are informed by and condition ideas about science and technology. She analyzes a wide range of notable science fiction films, novels, and short stories to argue that ideas about ecology are deeply entangled with ideas about scientific progress, but can also serve as a vehicle for critiquing scientific development.

    Melissa is also interested in higher education pedagogy and Chinese language teaching and learning. She earned certificates in Language Program Management and ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interviewing from Stanford's Language Center. She has taught classes in Mandarin Chinese, film studies, Chinese literature, and East Asian Studies. In the field of digital humanities, she has developed several projects and received the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Her other research interests include materialism, science fiction studies, critical theory, and nationalism.

  • Michaela Hulstyn

    Michaela Hulstyn

    SLE Lecturer

    BioMichaela Hulstyn is a Lecturer in Structured Liberal Education (SLE), a first-year residential education program at Stanford University.

    Her first monograph, _Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness_, is forthcoming with the University of Toronto Press in 2022. Her research interests center on 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, phenomenology of the self and intersubjectivity, cognitive approaches to transcultural literature, and literature as ethical philosophy. Her work has appeared in MLN, Philosophy and Literature, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, among other places.

    She previously held academic appointments at Florida State University and Reed College.

  • Harriett Virginia-Ann Jernigan

    Harriett Virginia-Ann Jernigan

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsLearner autonomy; task-, literacy-, and project-based instruction; storytelling, critical race theory (CRT); cultural rhetorics; large language models

    Writing across the disciplines; Humanities 2.0; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in pedagogy; social geography; presentation culture and public speaking

  • Jennifer Johnson

    Jennifer Johnson

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Intersections of Language, Identity and Culture, Sociocultural Studies in Education, Second Language Acquisition Theory and Bilingualism, Multimodal Communication and Theories of Embodiment, Deaf Studies

  • Christopher Kamrath

    Christopher Kamrath

    Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Citizenship and Political Dissent, Media History, Cultural Memory, the Role of Cultural Identity and Self-Fashioning in Rhetoric

  • Hayden Kantor

    Hayden Kantor

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsFood and agriculture; ethnographic writing; rhetorics of capitalism; ethics of care; culture and history of India and South Asia

  • Hyoung Sung Kim

    Hyoung Sung Kim

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioI am interested in the history of philosophy, in particular Kant and post-Kantian German idealism. I am specifically interested in how Kant and his successors saw the relation between questions in epistemology (knowledge), logic (rules for thinking), and metaphysics (what there is).

  • Valerie Kinsey

    Valerie Kinsey

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Writing and Critical Thinking Instruction; Institutional Rhetorics; Rhetorics of Race and Gender; Creative Writing; Philosophy and Rhetoric; Historiography; American History and Literature

  • Meade Klingensmith

    Meade Klingensmith

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioMeade Klingensmith is a Lecturer for Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). He received his BA in History from Oberlin College in 2012, was a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar at the University of Kent from 2013-14, and completed his PhD in History at Stanford in 2022.

    Meade is a historian of Britain and the British Empire with a theoretical interest in the limits and possibilities of metropolitan anti-imperialism. His research examines the British left's debate over what was then known as "the problem of Palestine" during the years of the British Mandate for Palestine (1923-48), when British activists navigated for the first time the competing claims to their solidarity from both the Labor Zionist and Palestinian nationalist movements.

    In his teaching, Meade is interested in the broader dynamics of empire throughout history and around the world. At Stanford he has taught on British and Middle East history and has designed courses on empire and resistance in the modern Middle East. In addition to his teaching at Stanford, Meade is committed to public, community, and high school education, having volunteered in multiple capacities at Sequoia High School in Redwood City and worked for Stanford Online High School. He is also a multi-instrumentalist musician who loves to incorporate music and music history in the classroom.

  • Alison Grace Laurence

    Alison Grace Laurence

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioAlison Laurence is a Lecturer in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education. She received her PhD from MIT’s interdisciplinary program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) in 2019. A cultural and environmental historian, she specializes in the historical study of nature on display, non-human animals, deep time, and extinction. Her current book manuscript--Of Dinosaurs and Culture Wars: A Monumental Reckoning with Modern American Monsters--traces how popular displays transformed dinosaurs and other creatures of deep time from scientific specimens to consumer objects and artifacts of everyday American life. Alison has published her research in Museum & Society, Notes & Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, and the Science Museum Group Journal. She holds a BA in Classics from Brown University and an MA in History and Public History from the University of New Orleans.

    At Stanford, Alison has taught special topics courses like "Animal Archives: History Beyond the Human" and a variety of courses within the first-year liberal arts requirement, including: "Stories Everywhere," "100,000 Years of War," "Design That Understands Us," and "The Meat We Eat." During the 2022-2023 academic year, she is teaching "Why College?: Your Education and the Good Life," "Citizenship in the 21st Century," and "Preventing Human Extinction."

  • Raechel Lee

    Raechel Lee

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: 20 - 21st century Latin American Literatures and Cultures; Creative Writing; Translation; Poetry

  • Helen Lie

    Helen Lie

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Communication Pedagogy; Visual Communication; Presentation Skills

  • Sigrid Lupieri

    Sigrid Lupieri

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioSigrid Lupieri is a Lecturer in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE). Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

    Her current book project investigates how medical humanitarians value human life in a crisis. Focusing on the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan, her research traces how security concerns, diplomatic efforts and notions of ‘deservingness’ influence who gets privileged access to medical care. Her work has been published in Social Science & Medicine, Global Social Policy, Forced Migration Review and Third World Quarterly.

    Sigrid received a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. She also holds an MPhil in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge, an M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University, and a B.A. from the University of Udine (Italy). Outside of academia, she has worked for several years as a journalist in Armenia, Georgia, and Germany, and as a UN officer in New York and New Delhi.

  • Mejgan Massoumi

    Mejgan Massoumi

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioMejgan Massoumi received her Ph.D. in June of 2021 from the History Department at Stanford University. Her work and research explores Afghan engagement with a global communication technology, the radio, during a period of intense political reform and social transformations (1960-1979). Drawing on archives in Farsi, Pashto, Tajik, Urdu, and English, and a collection of oral histories from former Radio Afghanistan employees and other producers of music and art, her work offers a fresh perspective on Afghan history by considering the mobile and fluid international networks made possible through the producers and consumers of the radio and music in the twentieth century and the centrality of Afghan people to that story.

    Having earned previous degrees in Architecture (B.A.) and City Planning (M.C.P) from the University of California at Berkeley, the foundation of her scholarship is built upon a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective. Her study of the past is informed through the study of sounds broadcast in and beyond the built environment.

    As a scholar and educator, and refugee and immigrant, Mejgan is committed to advancing a culture of equity and inclusion within academia through her activism and advocacy for diversity as well as her teaching and scholarship focused on the study of history through the experiences of marginalized peoples, places, and cultures.

    Mejgan's previous research explored how the dynamics of different forms of religious fundamentalisms are produced, represented and practiced in the city. The culmination of this research can be found in her co-edited book, The Fundamentalist City? Religiosity and the Remaking of Urban Space (Routledge, 2010). Another project that explored the multiple meanings of diversity, inclusion, and exclusion in fast-changing urban contexts resulted in the co-edited volume Urban Diversity: Space, Culture, and Inclusive Pluralism in Cities Worldwide (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Her master's research focused on race and inter-ethnic conflicts in post-9/11 Afghanistan, highlighting how humanitarian aid from the West contributed to deepening social and ethnic divides. She has also contributed articles to the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and the Journal of International Affairs at Columbia University.

    During the 2021-2022 academic year, Mejgan is teaching "Why College?", "Design that Understands Us", and "Environmental Sustainability: Global Predicaments and Possible Solutions."

    During the 2022-2023 academic year, Mejgan is teaching "Why College?" and "Citizenship in the 21st Century."

  • Hope McCoy

    Hope McCoy

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioDr. McCoy is a Lecturer and Fellow in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education program at Stanford University. McCoy’s research agenda focuses on the sociocultural dimensions of development studies, with an emphasis on education, public health, and the role of cultural diplomacy in geopolitics.

    Dr. McCoy's first book (2023) entitled: "From Congo to GONGO: Higher Education, Critical Geopolitics, and the New Red Scare" is one of the winners of an Emerging Scholars Competition in Black Studies. With a focus on Africa and Russia, this book traces the history of contact between the two regions. During each time period—education, political science, history, and Black studies are woven together, each era with shifting values and purposes that influence foreign relations between Africa and Eurasia.

    A Fulbright scholar (2015-2016, Russia) with multidisciplinary expertise, McCoy has also worked as a research strategist at Harvard University on projects related to racial justice, equity, and inclusion. Dr. McCoy earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Northwestern University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from UCLA in Education.

  • Sangeeta Mediratta

    Sangeeta Mediratta

    PWR Lecturer

    BioSangeeta Mediratta returns to PWR after a sojourn in Stanford Global Studies as Associate Director. She has served as Teaching Fellow and then Lecturer over five years in the past and returns with ever-greater enthusiasm for the teaching of writing and for working with her students. At Stanford, she has taught classes on rhetoric and writing, literature and film. Her PWR classes currently focus on maps, borders, networks, objects, and objectification. She loves learning about and helping her students develop their personalized research projects.

    She completed her Ph.D. from University of California, San Diego in English Literature. Her dissertation :Bazaars, Cannibals, and Sepoys: Sensationalism and Transnational Cultures of Empire" studied at the ways texts, objects, and spectacles in the U.S. and Britain drew upon imperial stories and objects to critique contemporary social evils such as slavery, class injustice, and the Corn Laws. She has also written on world cinema, popular culture, disability studies, as well as gender and race studies.

    Her current research focuses on the materiality of writing and on how students use culture as a way to build campus communities. She is also interested in student activism and empathy as a mode of living, connecting, writing, and being.

  • Kevin C. Moore

    Kevin C. Moore

    Lecturer

    BioKevin C. Moore is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. He holds a PhD in English from UCLA (2013). Prior to arriving at Stanford, he taught in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2013-2019). His research interests include propaganda studies, science and rhetoric, Ralph Ellison, and writer's block. Dr. Moore's work has appeared in Arts, Arizona Quarterly, Composition Studies, Writing on the Edge, MAKE, Souciant, and the Santa Barbara Independent, as well as collections such as Ralph Ellison in Context (Cambridge University Press 2021) and Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering (Springer 2017). He also writes fiction and creative nonfiction.

  • Tanya Schmidt Morstein

    Tanya Schmidt Morstein

    SLE Lecturer

    BioTanya Schmidt Morstein is a Lecturer for Structured Liberal Education (SLE). She graduated from Santa Clara University with a BA in English and minors in Classical Studies and Religious Studies, and she earned her MA and PhD in English from New York University in 2022. From 2022-23, Tanya held an appointment as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in The College Core Curriculum at NYU, where she was recognized with the university-wide prize for Outstanding Teaching. Tanya has taught a range of writing and humanities courses such as on Shakespeare, Austen, and utopian fiction.

    Tanya specializes in the literature and culture of the English Renaissance, and her research interests include classical reception, women’s writing, and intersections between literature and science. Her work on Spenser was awarded the Spenser Society’s Anne Lake Prescott Graduate Student Conference Paper Prize, and she also served as the graduate student representative on the executive committee for the international Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. Tanya’s research has been supported by NYU’s Global Research Institute in Florence, the Remarque Institute, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Huntington Library, among others. She is currently working on a book project about the early modern imagination.

  • Gabrielle Moyer

    Gabrielle Moyer

    Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Poetics of Art History; The Relation of Ethics and Aesthetics; Analytic Philosophy; Essayism

  • Miles Osgood

    Miles Osgood

    SLE Lecturer

    BioMiles Osgood is a Lecturer for Structured Liberal Education (SLE), with additional courses in Stanford English and Continuing Studies. After working at Oxford University Press in New York, Miles earned a PhD in English at Harvard, where he designed and taught courses on global modernism, women's literature, and James Joyce. He has published public essays in Slate, n+1, and the Washington Post, along with academic articles in Modernism/modernity and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

    Miles is at work on a book entitled "Culture Games," which documents the history of the 1968 Cultural Olympiad in Mexico City against the backdrop of Cold War espionage and global unrest. This work extends his dissertation research, which uncovers the little-known history of the Olympic Art Competitions of 1912-1948 and argues that twentieth-century world literature self-consciously adopted the qualities of international sport. Across studies of Olympic participants including Robert Graves, Jean Cocteau, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Bunya Koh, and through analysis of sport in the work of H.D., Ralph Ellison, Marianne Moore, and Kamau Brathwaite, Miles's published work reveals the surprisingly pervasive genre of "athletic art" across major axes of twentieth-century culture.

    Miles has been working in frosh education for many years, starting when he was a Resident Tutor as a Stanford senior and continuing with his time as a Teaching Fellow for Harvard's "Expos" writing program. From 2016 to 2018, Miles created and developed "J(oyce)-Term," a one-week winter-break bootcamp on Joyce's "Ulysses" for first-year students. He has extended his teaching to high-school students and lifelong learners online as designer and lead instructor for the "Masterpieces of World Literature" series on edX and with a course on the literature of the world wars ("Shell Shock") for the Master of Liberal Arts program. He's now building a "Storytelling and Mythmaking" class for undergrads studying literature and creative writing.

    In his spare time, Miles designs board games, edits home movies, and hikes around San Francisco with his dog Pico.

  • Matthew Palmer

    Matthew Palmer

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioMatthew Palmer (he/him/his) is a Lecturer in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE).

    Fluent in Modern Standard Chinese ("Mandarin") and Japanese, Matthew focuses his research at the intersection of corpus linguistics and computer-assisted language learning. His recent doctoral dissertation reveals previously-unattested language learner comprehension gaps pertaining to the perfective 了 "le": a ubiquitous yet frequently misunderstood Chinese grammatical marker. During his time as a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Matthew taught Chinese linguistics and advanced Chinese language courses.

    Matthew holds professional experience in East Asia product localization, automated language assessment, and pedagogical inclusivity training. He is a recipient of the U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Scholarship, the U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Graduate Fellowship, and the Stanford University Pigott Scholars Award.

    In his spare time, Matthew is passionate about mindfulness, video games, and group fitness.

  • Eldon Pei

    Eldon Pei

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSpecialisation: world cinema; documentary film; post-war visual cultures; East and Southeast Asian studies; propaganda; media, technology and society; critical theory; postcolonialism

  • Armando Jose Perez-Gea

    Armando Jose Perez-Gea

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioArmando Perez-Gea is a political theorist & philosopher whose research focuses on exploring Aristotle’s normative thought and contributing these insights to current debates, particularly those connected to institutional design. His main project is providing an Aristotelian response to the dominant theory of the state (where the state is the organization with the monopoly of legitimate violence). He is currently a Fellow to Diversify Teaching and Learning at Stanford University. He has a PhD in political science and philosophy and an MA in economics from Yale.

    His primary research proposes an Aristotelian theory of the state, in which the state is an association built upon a self-sufficient association and has as its twin goals to create a public realm where honor (understood as the recognition of a life worth remembering) is visible and to exercise a type of authority which has as its standard non-domination (“republican rule”). Currently his focus is expanding this last claim about authority by exploring Aristotle's theory of arche/rule and engaging with the workplace democracy literature.

    You can find him at the gym's weight room, walking around campus, and - like other Mexican-Americans - practicing his Spanish so that his grandmother (or abuela, as many movies like to call them) doesn't complain about his becoming less and less Mexican each day.

    His personal webpage is: www.perezgea.com

  • John Peterson

    John Peterson

    Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATIONS: Social Media and Changes to Mass Media; Art Versus Commerce; Liberal Arts Education & Public Schools; Social/Racial Justice; Consumer Culture; Music & Film; Technology & Learning; Public Policy

  • Sarah Pittock

    Sarah Pittock

    Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Writing Across the Curriculum; Writing In the Disciplines; Tutoring Pedagogy; Rhetoric of Children's Culture; 18th-Century Studies

  • Emily Polk

    Emily Polk

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Facilitation and Mobilization of Social Movements in the Digital and Public Spheres; Communication of Community-Led Responses to Climate Change; the Role and Impact of Scholar Activism; Participatory Research; Rhetoric of Sustainability and Environmental Humanities; Rhetoric of Global and Local Development

  • Belinda Ramírez

    Belinda Ramírez

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCultural anthropology; urban agriculture; farms and farming; food systems and foodways; food justice and sovereignty; environmental and climate justice; urban studies; agriculture and environment; citizenship; critical geography; critical race theory; ecology; ethnography; food (in)security/sovereignty; political anthropology; political ecology; political economy; race and ethnicity; racism(s); social movements and protest; social value; morality and ethics; community

  • Stephanie Reist

    Stephanie Reist

    Lecturer

    BioStephanie Virginia Reist is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Before joining PWR, she was a lecturing fellow in Stanford's COLLEGE Program. Prior to coming to Stanford, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Education Department at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, financed by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. She completed a PhD in Romance Studies with a focus on Latin American Cultural Studies as well as a Master's in Public Policy at Duke University in 2018. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Williams College.

    Her research and writing focus on issues of race, public policy, Black feminisms, cultural production, youth, and urban belonging in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Specifically, she is interested in the relationship between youth movements and access to higher education in Rio's predominately black, working class urban peripheries. As part of her commitment to public scholarship, her writing has been featured in RioOnWatch, Times Higher Education, The Independent and Jacobin Magazine.

    She also co-directed a short documentary on expanded access to higher education in Brazil that can be seen here: https://youtu.be/Q_60CIxvLHY

  • Rebecca Richardson

    Rebecca Richardson

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: The Rhetoric of Inspiration and Self-Help; Nineteenth-Century Literature; Environmental Studies; History of Political Economy; The Medical Humanities; Expressive Writing and Self-Reflection

  • Katherine Rothschild

    Katherine Rothschild

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsFourth wave feminism has offered many opportunities for activism from anonymous or covert places, such as X and Tiktok. How effective are these new forms of linguistic activism?

  • Jeremy Sabol

    Jeremy Sabol

    SLE Associate Director

    BioJeremy Sabol is the Associate Director of Stanford's Program in Structured Liberal Education (SLE), where he has taught as a Lecturer since 2003. Jeremy majored in physics and literature as an undergraduate, then received his Ph.D. in French. His dissertation examined the conceptual role of fiction in Descartes' physics and philosophy, as well as the impact of this use of fiction in later 17th-century French literary texts. Jeremy specializes in early modern European thought and French existentialism. Jeremy also teaches the history & ethics of design at Stanford's d.school, and he has lectured for Stanford's Master of Liberal Arts program since 2012.

  • Kim Savelson

    Kim Savelson

    Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Design Thinking for Writing & Research; Science and Health Communication; Storytelling; Creativity Studies; Innovation Across the Disciplines

  • Sam Sax

    Sam Sax

    Lecturer

    BioSam Sax is a writer, performer, and educator currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University. They're the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and ‘Bury It’ winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They're the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Granta and elsewhere. Sam's received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, The Poetry Foundation, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.

  • Tesla Schaeffer

    Tesla Schaeffer

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: 20th Century Rhetoric and Literature; Trauma Studies; Theories of Affect and Emotion; Multilingual Learning; Composition Pedagogy

  • Julia Schulte

    Julia Schulte

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly Interestspeer review, reading strategies, reflection, native speakerism in ESL

  • Nestor Silva

    Nestor Silva

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI study the environmental politics of hydrocarbon extraction sites in the Americas. These sites are inherently uncertain, both socially and ecologically. My research analyzes how science and politics are applied to these uncertainties. I argue that extraction-site politics demonstrate that colonial ideals still inspire responses to fossil fuels and a number of other modern uncertainties.

  • Lynn Sokei

    Lynn Sokei

    Lecturer

    BioLynn Sokei holds a PhD in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University.

  • Jennifer Stonaker

    Jennifer Stonaker

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Electronic Portfolios; Science Communication; Science Storytelling

  • Lisa Marie Swan

    Lisa Marie Swan

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Composition Pedagogy; Equity; Faculty Professional Development

  • Kathleen Tarr

    Kathleen Tarr

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Jurisprudence; Rhetoric and Climate Catastrophe; Strategic Planning in International Relations and Governments; Rhetoric and Global Economy; and Equal Employment Opportunity in the Entertainment Industry

  • John Turman

    John Turman

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioJohn Turman is a lecturer for the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) program. He earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley and completed his PhD in philosophy at Stanford University. John's current research is focused on foundational questions about the concept of knowledge, concepts of action, concepts of the mind, and how facts about a person's mind explain facts about their behavior. John is also a passionate (beginner) video game development hobbyist and a long-time music/audio production hobbyist (and has a few other irons in the fire).

  • Cynthia Laura Vialle-Giancotti

    Cynthia Laura Vialle-Giancotti

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioCynthia is a Lecturer for the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Program in Undergraduate Education.

    Her research encompasses 17th and 18th century French literary forms, with a focus on novels, literary portraits, gendered and ageist representations.

    Her dissertation titled: "Framing Portraits in 18th-Century French Novels" focuses on the portrayal of the body in French fiction of the 17th and 18th centuries. Its principal aim is to show the import of 17th century female authors in shaping 18th century descriptive practices. It also reveals the functions that descriptions of the body serve in the 18th century: instructing and guiding the reader, as well as entertaining her. Lastly, it underlines how descriptive practices offered a medium for female authors to assert their cultural primacy, against male narrative traditions.

    Teaching is my greatest passion. At Stanford I have taught and TA'd classes on various subjects (French language, European History, Italian literature, German Culture, English Gothic Novels, Autobiographies and History of Revolutions) using innovative methods and assignments. My whole teaching approach is oriented toward one goal: to make students perceive the real-life impact of literary studies in particular and the humanities more in general. I am committed to rendering the study of the humanities and the apprenticeship of languages accessible to our diverse community. Having been a FLI (First Generation College) student I understand the difficulties that students from this community encounter and I am happy to support them in their learning needs.

    Research Interests: the novel and novel theory, gender studies, life-writing genres, the body and issues of corporality (death, sickness, aging), supernatural genres, violence against women, history and art history.

  • Daniela R. P. Weiner

    Daniela R. P. Weiner

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioDaniela R. P. Weiner is a COLLEGE Lecturer in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education program.

    Before joining the COLLEGE program, she was a Jim Joseph Postdoctoral Fellow in the Concentration in Education & Jewish Studies in the Stanford Graduate School of Education (2020-2022). She is a historian of modern European history (with a focus on Germany and Italy), modern Jewish history, and the Holocaust. Her book, Teaching a Dark Chapter: History Books and the Holocaust in Italy and the Germanys, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press (2024) and explores how the post-fascist countries of East Germany, West Germany, and Italy taught the Second World War and the Holocaust in their educational systems. The book specifically explores the representations of these events in textbooks. A new project focuses on the history of baptism and conversion during the Holocaust and draws on the newly opened Vatican and Jesuit archives from the period of the Second World War.

    Her research has been published in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, and Journal of Contemporary History. She has received fellowships/grants from: the Fulbright U.S. Student Program (Germany, AY 2018- 2019); the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute; the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.; the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies; and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies.

    She teaches courses in interdisciplinary liberal education, modern European history, and Holocaust Studies.

  • Roberta Wolfson

    Roberta Wolfson

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly Interests20th and 21st Century Multiethnic U.S. Literatures, Comparative Ethnic Studies, Critical Mixed Race Studies, Racial and Social Justice, Ethnofuturist Speculative Fiction, Popular U.S. Culture, Risk and Security Studies

  • Cassie Wright

    Cassie Wright

    PWR Advanced Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Writing Program Administration; Rhetorical Theory, Writing Studies and Assessment, Critical Discourse Analysis , Sports Rhetorics

  • Irena Yamboliev

    Irena Yamboliev

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSPECIALIZATION: Literature and Culture of 19th- and 20th-Century Britain; Aesthetics; Narrative Theory; Science and its Rhetoric; Color Theory; Digital Humanities; Writing Pedagogy; Queer Theory

  • Irmak Yazici

    Irmak Yazici

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioIrmak Yazici is a Lecturer and Fellow in the Civic, Liberal, Global Education (COLLEGE) Program at Stanford University. Irmak is a political scientist by training and her research broadly focuses on secularism and religion in global and comparative politics. She's particularly interested in how secular law and policies regulate the public sphere in democracies and the cases in which such regulation can foster religious nationalist ideologies. Irmak is currently working on a book project that details this complex overlap between secularism, democracy, and religious nationalism.

    Prior to her appointment at Stanford, Irmak was a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She designed and taught a broad range of courses, including courses on religion and constitutional law in the United States, the politics of the media, environmental law and politics, American politics, global/comparative politics, and political inquiry/analysis.

    Irmak is a Fulbright alumna (2012–2014) and her research received funding from the American Political Science Association (APSA), International Studies Association (ISA), and Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

  • John Young

    John Young

    COLLEGE Lecturer

    BioJohn Young is a lecturer in Civic, Liberal and Global Education (COLLEGE). John completed his Bachelor's at Dartmouth College before earning his M.S. and PhD in Political Science at Stanford University.

    John’s research focuses on the built environment, and brings together scholarship from political theory, geography, economics, and psychology. Three big questions orient his work. How does the built environment affect the people who live in and move through it? How do laws, economics, and technology produce the built environment we have? Finally, do people have normative and political entitlements to physical space, and if so, what are they and how can they be secured in public space, private space, and with land-use policy?

    John also works in the construction trades, building, repairing, and upgrading residential structures. He specializes in sustainable building and energy efficiency. John finds it deeply rewarding to help people enjoy their home and get more practical use from it, putting theory and practice together to create built environments conducive to human flourishing.