Gabriel K. Wolfenstein, Ph.D.
Undergraduate Advising Director, Academic Advising Operations
Bio
I am Undergraduate Advising Director (UAD) at Stanford, so I am here to help students get the most out of their Stanford experiences, whether through helping students explore and find majors, decide on courses, get started in, and get guidance in, their research, managing work/life balance, find resources if they are struggling, and provide space and guidance to reflect on how their Stanford journey fits into their evolving goals, at Stanford and beyond.
My Ph.D. is in British History and the History of Science, focusing on the Victorian era. I work on questions related to the British census, the popularization of scientific ideas, and identity formation. Prior to coming to Academic Advising, I worked at CESTA on a variety of projects, like crowdsourcing, and the Chinese Railroad Workers Project. Before that I taught in Stanford's Thinking Matters program, and its predecessor program, IHUM, which is what brought me to Stanford in 2006. I did my Ph.D. at UCLA, and am from Los Angeles. I have taught courses on Charles Dickens and social movements, Utopian and Dystopian Literature in the 19th through the 21st centuries, how we represent the world around us (focusing on maps, statistics, and photography). In both my teaching and research, I make use of a variety of historical sources, statistical data to parliamentary records to magazines to literature.
In my role as a UAD, I offer guidance to students in research, across the humanities, social sciences, art, and STEM. Outside of my own scholarship, my professional interests broadly include the different ways we represent the world around us, which include archival records, creative works (fiction, film, video games, etc.), photographic records, maps, and more. This has informed my scholarship, the courses I teach, and helps me support students in finding their own areas of scholarly, artistic, and professional interests
Current Role at Stanford
Undergraduate Advising Director