Eleni Bastéa was born and grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece. She holds a BA in art history from Bryn Mawr College (US), as well as a Master’s of Architecture and PhD in architectural history, both from the University of California at Berkeley. She teaches at the University of New Mexico (US), where she is Regents' Professor of Architecture and was past director of the International Studies Institute. Bastéa’s books include The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth (Cambridge University Press, 2000), also published in Greek (Libro, 2008, author's translation), Memory and Architecture (University of New Mexico Press, 2004), and Venice without Gondolas, a poetry collection (Finishing Line Press, 2013). The recipient of several grants and awards, she works on memory and architecture, cities and literature, and on modern Greece and Turkey.

Project Summary:

Geographies of Loss focuses on the memory of lost places among refugees and on the politics of commemoration. The plight of refugees continues to form the focus of most scholarly studies. We know little, however, of how these refugees remember the places they left behind and how those memories shape them. Philosophers have proposed that belonging in a stable environment contributes to the construction of one’s identity. Scholars of refugee studies contend that identity is affected by exile. No one to date has examined both the experience of a stable environment and the experience of displacement. Bastéa suggests that the legacy of loss engenders not only nostalgia, but also a vital sense of strength. Studies on the politics of commemoration describe how governments construct sites of memory to support the homogenizing aims of the nation–state. Geographies of Loss dwells on the refugees’ contradictory narratives that reflect the fluidity of one’s relationship with the built environment, and examines the role of political amnesia, necessary in the construction of peaceful, post-war political landscapes, and the willful destruction of memory through the destruction of monuments and memorials. By addressing the limits of commemoration, Bastéa aims to deepen understanding of social and national memory.

Ari Bryen's interests are in law and violence, and in particular the places where the two intersect. He specializes in the history of the Roman Empire, but is interested in the dynamics of pre-modern cultures more generally. He is currently assistant professor of history and classics at Vanderbilt.

Project Summary:

Bryen is working on a book tentatively entitled The Judgment of the Provinces. This book seeks to understand the diverse modes through which Roman provincial populations, especially in the eastern empire, conceived of law, and how the imperial state eventually sought to manage them.

Lina Chhun studies historical violence, war, and militarism, with a focus on questions of racial disposability in the context of the U.S. Cold War in Southeast Asia.  She received her PhD in gender studies from the University of California, Los Angeles in spring 2019. Lina’s work has been published in Amerasia Journal, and she has a forthcoming article in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies.

Project Summary:

This study queries the complex relationship between registers of memory regarding the Cambodian Holocaust of 1975-79 and remembrances of the preceding U.S. bombing campaigns of 1964-1973. The manuscript challenges historical models of “tragedy” and individualized models of trauma—as damage-centered, deviance-driven, and/or invested in abjection, vulnerability, and injury—which disavow the complex humanity of Cambodian survivors and the continually intersubjective ways in which knowledge about Cambodia is produced and reproduced.

Brian DeLay is associate professor of history at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersection of United States, Latin American, and Indigenous histories. He is the author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (Yale, 2008), co-author of the United States history textbook Experience History (McGraw-Hill), and editor of North American Borderlands (Routledge, 2013).

Project Summary:

DeLay’s current work concerns guns and power in the Americas. He is writing two books. The first explains how the international arms trade shaped the Age of Revolutions, and the second excavates the relationship between guns, freedom, and domination in the Americas before World War II. At the Humanities Center, he will also develop a digital humanities project that uses customs records to reconstruct the global arms trade between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I.

Ramzi Fawaz is associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), which won the 2017 ASAP Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. His research and teaching explore the cultural production of radical left-wing social movements in the late 20th century United States, with particular focus on movements for women's and gay liberation, black power, and AIDS activism. 

Project Summary:

Queer Forms explores how the central values of movements for women's and gay liberation in the 1970s—including consciousness-raising, separatism, coming out of the closet, and alternative kinship—came to be translated into a range of American popular culture forms. Throughout the 1970s, movements for women's and gay liberation fought a range of social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly explode definitions of normative gender and sexuality; one long-term effect of this project was to encourage artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to, non-normative genders and sexualities. Perhaps counter-intuitively, such aesthetic projects to represent queer gender and sexuality often appeared in a range of traditional, or seemingly generic, popular forms including the sequential format of comic strip serials, the token figures of science fiction genre, the narrative conventions of film melodrama, and the serialized rhythm of installment fiction among others. Fawaz unpacks how each of these mediums and genres were creatively reworked or innovated to account for, and make meaningful, the heterogenous experience of gender and sexual non-conformity, consequently infusing the popular imagination of Americans in the 1970s and after.

Fiona Griffiths is a historian of medieval Western Europe, focusing on intellectual and religious life from the ninth to the thirteenth century. She is the author of Nuns' Priests' Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women's Monastic Life (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2018) and The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2007).

Project Summary:

In Priests’ Wives: Confronting Celibacy in the Age of Reform (ca. 1040-1215), Griffiths explores the tumultuous centuries of medieval church “reform”—a central goal of which was to enforce the celibacy of the clergy, removing women from the homes and affections of churchmen. Exploring the implications of priestly celibacy for clerical wives, Griffiths works to recapture a history of these women, considering their importance to medieval communities and their potential impact on spirituality and religious life. 

Lyndsey Hoh Copeland studies music and sound making practices in Francophone West Africa. She received her D.Phil. in ethnomusicology from the University of Oxford, her M.Phil. in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, and her B.M. in music performance from the University of Southern California. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Fulbright Foundation, and the University of Oxford.

Project Summary:

Lyndsey’s current research focuses on music and education in the Republic of Benin. Her first project examines the role of material, masculinity, and anxiety in Benin’s amateur fanfarescene. Her second project is a comparative study of music education, listening practices, and pedagogies of sound within two schools for the Deaf in southern Benin.

Mei Li Inouye is an East Asian Languages and Cultures doctoral candidate at Stanford University. Situating China in the world, her research explores community formation, transnational exchanges and appropriations, genre and media boundary crossings, and the mediating role of memory in modern Chinese visual culture, performance, and literature.

Project Summary:

Targeting the common critique of Jiang Qing (also known as Madame Mao) as an artful actor who used her bodily promiscuity to attain power, this project examines representations of and performances by Jiang Qing as a stage and screen actress, a revolutionary celebrity wife, a cultural reformer, and a national villain/scapegoat from the 1930s to the present. Combining archival sources with performance repertoire, this project seeks to understand how representations of Jiang Qing by certain stakeholders contributed to the post-Mao structure of feeling about her and how her own performances and writings make visible her agency and influence in the creation of a performance-based mass cultural apparatus. 

Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, professor of comparative literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford, home to major tracks in philosophy and literature. Since 2013, he has also been the director of the Structured Liberal Education Program at Stanford. Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and of How To Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012). He is also the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009, with Michael Saler). Since 2017, Professor Landy has been a co-host of the nationally syndicated radio show "Philosophy Talk." He has also guest-hosted Robert Harrison's Entitled Opinions (with Lera Boroditsky on "Language and Thought," with Michael Saler on "Re-Enchantment," with John Perry and Ken Taylor on the "Uses of Philosophy," and with Alexander Nehamas on "Beauty"). And he has appeared as guest on "Philosophy Talk," "Forum," and "To the Best of Our Knowledge." Professor Landy has received the Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence (1999), and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2001).

Project Summary:

Professor Landy has been commissioned by Oxford to write a book on Proust for their “Very Short Introduction” series. Additionally, he is working on a trade book, tentatively titled How Fiction can (Really) Change Your Life, which will explore 11 different things that sophisticated novels and films and TV shows can do for us. Rather than just being devices for transmitting ideas, works of fiction are often creators of experiences—experiences that help us to know what we know, see what we see, feel what we feel, feel what someone else feels, cultivate our mental capacities, and gain formal models for the shape of a life.

Julian Lim is an assistant professor of history at Arizona State University (Tempe). Trained in history and law, she focuses on immigration, borders, and race.  She is the author of Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), which examines the history of diverse immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the development of immigration policy and law on both sides of the border.

Project Summary:

Since the first federal immigration laws of the late nineteenth century, marriage has both directly and indirectly informed the criteria for immigrant admissions, fundamentally shaping ideas about who belongs in the American body politic and who does not. Domestic Boundaries offers the first comprehensive historical study of how marriage – traditionally considered a matter of state law – was in fact shaped by the federal administration of United States immigration law. The project locates marriage at the center of numerous and ongoing debates about immigrant admission to the country, and analyzes the ways in which diverse groups and both sexes negotiated the contemporary boundaries of marriage at the nation’s border. 

Nick received his PhD in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2018. He is interested in gender and sexuality in Russia.

Project Summary:

Nick is currently working on a book project illustrating that queerness formed a meaningful part of Russian Orthodox culture in the early modern period. His next book project will focus on the criminalization of homosexuality in Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in comparison with Northern Europe. It will explore legal discourses of homosexuality and their lived consequences.

Jeff Nagy is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication. His research interests include the datafication of emotions and emotional data as a corporate asset; the history and future of computer-mediated labor; and the political economy of platforms. From 2015-2019, he was the SAP Stanford Graduate Fellow.

Project Summary:

This dissertation uncovers how computer scientists, psychologists, marketers, and others came together to make emotion computable over the second half of the 20th century. Drawing on original archival research, Nagy examines the transformation of emotion into data from post-World War II cybernetics to contemporary sentiment analytics, and he uses this history to reconsider the role that emotional data play as manipulatable variables and corporate assets in the political economy of digital platforms.

Rhodes Pinto studies the philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome. He received his PhD and MPhil in classics (ancient philosophy) from the University of Cambridge and his BA in philosophy and classics from Villanova University.

Project Summary:

The project offers the first comprehensive study of motion in early Greek (Presocratic) philosophy by tracing through the Presocratics the presence and combinations of seven themes: causation of motion, circular motion, self-motion, soul, mind, immortality, and divinity. By letting the evidence on each Presocratic’s conception of motion and other philosophical views illuminate each another, the work offers new interpretations of the philosophy of the Presocratics and a re-evaluation both of the importance of motion in early Greek philosophy and of the development of Plato’s and Aristotle’s metaphysics.

John Tennant’s research concerns the transmission of cultural wisdom in Greek prose and poetry and how this transmission was called into question in the late fifth century BCE – coming to a head in works by authors such as Euripides, Thucydides, and especially Plato. John explores how proverbs, aphorisms, and other rhetorical commonplaces become particularly important at times when shared discourse breaks down, when language itself becomes an object of mistrust. John received his PhD in classics from the University of California, Los Angeles (2019) and his MA in classics from Stanford University (2013). The transformative potential of figurative speech employed in proverbs became apparent to John while practicing as a union labor lawyer, his previous profession. The law itself is arguably composed in large part of just such phrases, with similar normative aspirations. John received his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, where he first became interested in the seeming connections between modes of discourse and speakers’ ethics and moral values. In 2002-03, John received a Fulbright Post-Doc Research Fellowship to work with police unions and immigrants' rights advocates in Paris, France, studying the ways in which tensions might be reduced in the Parisian suburbs between rank-and-file police officers and the communities they serve, composed primarily of Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb.

Project Summary:

John’s current project (a continuation of the subject of his dissertation) is to frame Plato’s Republic as an attempt to reform the state of discourse in a politico-discursive crisis that occurred toward the end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth century in Athens, by focusing on the previously unexplored role that proverbs and gnômai play in Plato’s creation of the ideal polis. Plato uses such commonplaces not solely for the purpose of lending his dialogue a more authentic character. Rather, they both elucidate the dynamics of power that inhere in the prevailing modes of Athenian discourse and provide a locus for Plato’s critique of the improper use of language. Plato reveals how discursive reform is inseparable from social and political reform. Proverbs, gnômai, and other rhetorical topoi serve collectively as one of the building blocks of a just society. Put simply, wordcraft isstatecraft.

Callie Ward a PhD candidate in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. She received her BA in Hispanic studies and English from the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research focuses on contemporary Latin American literature and issues of human rights. Beyond Stanford, her commitments and interests include volunteering with the Stanford Prison Education Program and with non-profit legal organizations, where she has worked with asylum seekers from Central America and conducted related research.

Project Summary:

From an interdisciplinary perspective situated across law and literature, Ward’s dissertation examines what she defines as the literature of human rights: legal and literary narratives with a truth-seeking function vis-à-vis the past that have the potential to impact the present. Focusing on Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, she considers the ways in which these narratives contribute to the construction of a public critical consciousness and thus intervene in the current political and social climate.

Benjamin Wilson is an assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard University, where he studies and teaches the history of modern physics, Cold War history, and the intellectual history of the nuclear age.

Project Summary:

Wilson’s book project presents a new intellectual and social history of United States nuclear strategy and arms control during the Cold War, focusing on the key idea of “strategic stability.” Long thought to be inherent to the very logic of nuclear deterrence, stability was at once an analogy drawn from other fields (including Keynesian macroeconomics and cybernetics) and a rationalization, allowing elite nuclear thinkers to play contradictory roles as classified consultants for, and public critics of, the nuclear weapons complex.

Adrien Zakar received a PhD in history from Columbia University in 2018 and a BA in International Relations from the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva. His research and teaching interests are in the impact of technologies of surveillance on necropolitics, environmental thinking, and conceptions of selfhood and society in the Middle East. He is currently developing his dissertation into a manuscript, titled “The Disembodied Eye: Technologies of Surveillance and the Logistics of Perception in Syria.”

Project Summary:

The Disembodied Eye investigates how the development and circulation of technologies of surveillance shaped institutional structures, systems of representation, and ideas of subjectivity in the Ottoman Empire and Syria (1900-1948). Ways of mapping and enframing sustained competing social and institutional structures by inculcating upon their targeted audience concrete procedures for disciplining perception. The project argues that this process of cultural and technological transformation helped reconfigure the visual, political and ethical norms of war and peace throughout the transition from empire to nation-states.