Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education
Showing 1-42 of 42 Results
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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.
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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.
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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 natural sciences with other disciplines such as theology, philosophy, and literature. 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 sustainable flourishing.
In his free time, find Tony bird watching, baking, playing a board game, or trying a new food. -
Altair Brandon-Salmon
COLLEGE Lecturer
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 is the curatorial assistant at the Sheldonian Theatre, University of Oxford, and a guest curator with Projects Twenty Two in Cornwall, England. Previously, he was the assistant curator at Campion Hall, University of Oxford.
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) -
Katherine Ding
SLE Lecturer
BioKatherine Ding is a Lecturer for Structured Liberal Education. She received an MA in English Literature and Critical Theory from UC Irvine, and a PhD in English Literature from UC Berkeley. Prior to arriving at Stanford, she taught both critical and creative writing at Mount Tamalpais College (formerly the Prison University Project) in San Quentin, at Outer Coast College in Sikta, Alaska, and at UC Berkeley.
Braiding creative non-fiction with critical analysis, Katherine’s dissertation on the British Romantic poet William Blake explores what it means for knowledge to be fully embodied, and what the disembodiment of knowledge has cost us. Her current book project expands that inquiry—diving into fields as diverse as the neuroscience of interoception, exercise science, anthropology, and childhood development—to explore how the human organism observes, feels, and learns in relation to others in its embodied milieu.
In the classroom, Katherine is fascinated by the ever-shifting question of how we learn. Where do our ideas come from? What practices foster and facilitate good thinking? How might writing transform rather than simply express our thoughts and ideas? What is the relationship between reading, thinking, feeling, and writing? -
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
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. -
Courtney Blair Hodrick
COLLEGE Lecturer
BioCourtney Hodrick is a Lecturer in Civic, Global, and Liberal Education (COLLEGE). She received her BA in Humanities, in the Intellectual History track, from Yale University in 2016. In the 2016-2017 academic year, she worked as an English Language Teaching Assistant through Fulbright Austria at the Pädagogoische Hochschule Vorarlberg. She completed her PhD in German Studies at Stanford University in 2023, and during the 2023-2024 academic year held the Eli Reinhard Stanford Alumni Postdoctoral Fellowship in Jewish Studies at Stanford's Taube Center for Jewish Studies. Courtney works on German-Jewish thought in the mid-20th century. Her dissertation focused on the role that hope plays in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt.
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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. -
Grace Huckins
COLLEGE Lecturer
BioGrace Huckins is a lecturer with the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education program. They earned their PhD in neuroscience from Stanford, where they also completed a PhD minor in philosophy. Their research centers on explanation in neuroscience: they explore approaches for developing brain-based explanation of human experiences and behaviors, and they simultaneously investigate whether or not those explanations are likely to be of value to the general public. Alongside their research and teaching, they also write about neuroscience, health, and artificial intelligence for publications like WIRED, Slate, and MIT Technology Review.
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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. -
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. -
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).
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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 question 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 and resistance throughout history and around the world. At Stanford he has taught on British and Middle East history and has designed courses on the global history of pacifism and nonviolence and 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. He is also a multi-instrumentalist musician who loves to incorporate music and music history in the classroom. -
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. -
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. -
Hope McCoy
COLLEGE Lecturer
BioHope McCoy is a Lecturer in International Relations and 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 international education, global citizenship, 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 '' was one of the winners of the Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Black Studies. With a focus on Africa and Russia, this book traces the history of diplomacy between the two regions.
A two-time Fulbright recipient (2015 to Russia, and 2025 to the British Virgin Islands) with multidisciplinary expertise, Dr. McCoy earned a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and a M.A. and Ph.D. from UCLA. -
Richard McGrail
COLLEGE Lecturer
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2010Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEthnographic research describes the daily lives of children in California's foster care system who live in therapeutic residential group homes. Research questions how relationships of trust and attachement are formed between children and their adult caregivers, as well as among the children themselves.
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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. -
Miles Osgood
SLE Lecturer
BioMiles Osgood is a Lecturer for English, Structured Liberal Education (SLE), and Continuing Studies. After working at Oxford University Press in New York, Miles earned a PhD in English at Harvard. 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. Through his research on the Olympics and the arts, he's recently been interviewed in print in The New York Times and The Architectural Review, and on the air on Very Special Episodes and NBC Bay Area.
Miles is at work on a book entitled "Poet, Painter, Sprinter, Spy," 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. He also recently contributed to the Fitzwilliam Museum's "Paris 1924" exhibition as an academic consultant.
At Stanford, Miles has taught for SLE since 2019, where he lectures regularly on the avant-garde and Virginia Woolf. He is now also teaching two courses for Stanford English: "Storytelling and Mythmaking: Modern Odysseys," a class that combines classics, contemporary literature, and creative writing; and "Modernism and its Manifestos," a survey of literary monuments and their explanatory essays from the 1910s to the 1930s. He also gives lectures in Continuing Studies with "Shell-Shock: The World Wars in Literature, Art, and Film," a gateway course for the Master of Liberal Arts program. Previously, at Harvard, he designed courses on world literature for edX, on James Joyce's Ulysses for Wintersession, and on women's literature & global short fiction for the Junior Tutorial program.
In his spare time, Miles designs board games, edits home movies, and hikes around San Francisco with his dog Pico. -
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. -
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 -
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.
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Gabriela Lila Salvidea
SLE Lecturer
BioGabriela Salvidea is a Lecturer for Structured Liberal Education. She earned a B.A. from Whitman College in 2010, majoring in philosophy and minoring in English. She earned her M.A. in English at Stanford University in 2016, and then her Ph.D., also from Stanford English, in 2023.
Gabriela’s research centers on postwar and contemporary American literatures, which she defines broadly to include certain texts written by academic humanists. She focuses on historicizing the politics of university culture—its research and its pedagogical practices—by studying texts which exist between the cultures of creative and scholarly writing, a kind of writing she treats as distinctive to the 20th and 21st centuries.
She has done editorial work for Bitch Magazine and, more recently, Commune Magazine and Endnotes Journal. She also, for a time, dabbled in news reporting. Before coming to Stanford, she was as a corps member in Teach for America, teaching for Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles. She then taught for the Oakland Unified School District and for the Friends School in Ramallah, Palestine. Before her work in public schools, she was a a social worker who managed a shelter for unhoused women in rural Washington. -
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 Yr Dead (a novel), Long listed for the National Book Award, and Pig named one of the best books of 2023 by New York Magazine and Electric Lit. They're also 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.
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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.
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Cristian Felipe Soler Reyes
COLLEGE Lecturer
BioCristian Felipe Soler Reyes received a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Studies from Stanford University in 2023. His research looks at different Latin American art forms (painting, sculpture, cinema, literature, etc.) from the last 30 years with a transnational, cross-cultural, and transdisciplinary lens.
During his time as a graduate student at Stanford, he created and taught three courses: “Spanish through Comics,” “Latin American Art and Literature,” and “Archaeology of Computer Science.” The first course was an innovative program that put together content-based materials with language learning. It introduced students to comics that presented political discussions and struggles from Hispanic communities across Latin America and the US while it also gave them creative assignments that allowed them to practice and improve their Spanish. “Latin American Art and Literature” was a course offered in the Art History Department that focused on Latin American art and that was entirely taught in Spanish. Finally, “Archaeology of Computer Science” presented students the role that some non-Western societies played in the construction of this field.
Besides his courses, Cristian also chaired for two years “Comics: More than Words,” a research group that was not only a hub for interdisciplinary thought, but also fostered diversity. Students from different backgrounds came together in this space to learn from each other and to exchange their different perspectives. -
Kirsten Isabel Verster
COLLEGE Lecturer
BioHumanities Resume:
TBD
Teaching Resume: TBD
PhD/Science:
While most of us are familiar with vertical transfer (e.g. I get genes from my father and mother), I find horizontal gene transfer (HGT) - exchanging genes between species - far more compelling. Imagine if you ate a jellyfish and the next day you glowed in the dark and had poisonous stingers! The prevalence of HGT in natural history, and its ability to suddenly create incredible phenotypes in animals, is becoming more apparent every year. I am currently studying HGT of cytolethal distending toxin B in insects in the Integrative Biology Department at University of California - Berkeley. I discovered that cdtB was transferred into the genomes of several drosophilid and aphid lineages (Verster et al 2019, Molecular Biology and Evolution). I also recently found that cdtB (in addition to other toxin genes) was transferred into an agriculturally devastating clade of insects known as midges - and, interestingly, that living in the same habitat may increase the likelihood of HGT between organisms (Verster and Tarnopol et al 2021, Genome Biology and Evolution).
Education
BA, Spanish Literature, University of Florida, 2014
BA, Zoology, University of Florida, 2014
PhD, University of California - Berkeley, 2022
Postdoc, Stanford University, 2022 - 2024
COLLEGE Lecturer, 2024-present -
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. -
Meghan Warner
COLLEGE Lecturer
BioMeghan is a Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) Lecturer and a sociologist. She uses qualitative methods to study bodies as sites for the reproduction of gender inequality. More specifically, she studies sexual violence, family formation, and pregnancy and childbirth. Her work can be found in Sociological Perspectives, Contexts, and The Annual Review of Law and Social Science.
In her dissertation, she uses interviews, surveys, and observations to study how women in the SF Bay Area prepare for and experience their first births. This research is supported by grants from the American Sociological Association, the Center for Institutional Courage, the Stanford Ethnography Lab, and the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. -
Gregory Watkins
SLE Lecturer
BioGreg Watkins has taught in Structured Liberal Education (SLE) since 2002 and is a former Associate Director of the program. He has a BA in Social Theory from Stanford University, an MFA in Film Production from UCLA, and a dual PhD in Religious Studies and Humanities, also from Stanford University. Greg's research interests hover around the intersections of film and religion. He currently serves as a lecturer for SLE in a pilot program that provides an online moral philosophy class to students at Title 1 high schools. The course, called "Searching Together for the Common Good," is made possible through a collaboration with Stanford Digital Education and the National Education Equity Lab.
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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, was published by 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. In AY 2024-2025, she will teach the courses "Citizenship in the 21st Century" and "Stanford Confronts the 'Fascist Moment'." -
Irmak Yazici
COLLEGE Lecturer
BioDr. Irmak 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 (methods).
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
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. -
Daniel Zimmer
COLLEGE Lecturer
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research focuses on the scientific history of anthropogenic existential risk and its impact on Western political thought. I focus in particular on the development of massed thermonuclear arsenals during the 1950s, the rise of Earth System science and attendant ecological risks during the 1980s, and the anxieties surrounding the prospect of artificial super intelligence that took hold in the 2000s.
