Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education
Showing 21-30 of 35 Results
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Elaine Lai
COLLEGE Lecturer, Civic, Liberal, and Global Education
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. -
Richard McGrail
COLLEGE Lecturer, Civic, Liberal, and Global Education
Current 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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Michelle Katherine Oing
Lecturer, Civic, Liberal, and Global Education
BioMichelle Oing is a scholar of medieval and early modern European art, with a focus on sculpture, pilgrimage, and puppetry (PhD, Yale University). Recent and forthcoming scholarly articles examine sacred puppets, carnival performances, and theatrical representations of miraculous images in the late medieval period. She has held teaching positions in art history at Yale University, Pomona College, and Stanford University.
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Jeremy Sabol
SLE Associate Director, Structured Liberal Education
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, Structured Liberal Education
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 has also worked as a freelance reporter, covering local news for a small-town newspaper in Washington state. Before coming to Stanford, she served 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 in 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, Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture
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.
