Keith Baker is professor of early modern European history and, by courtesy, of French and Italian, J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, and Jean-Paul Gimon Director of the France-Stanford Center. His research focuses on intellectual history and the history of political culture, and on the cultural and political origins of the Englightenment and the French Revolution. He is the author of Condorcet. From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics and Inventing the French Revolution. Prof. Baker has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. In 2014, he won the American Historical Association's lifetime achievement award.

Project Summary:

Keith Baker is currently working on an intellectual biography of the French Revolution’s prophet of terror, Jean-Paul Marat.

Munia Bhaumik (PhD, UC Berkeley) is a scholar of comparative literature, law, and philosophy. The corpus of her writings and first monograph, In Liberty’s Shadow: The Noncitizen in American Letters and Law, is most animated by the ethics of accounting for the specific quandary of racialized subjects denied rights. Highlighting the importance of literary form to studies of restrictive politics and law, her research has been recognized by numerous national and international awards for offering re-conceptualizations of democracy and citizenship rights. 

Project Summary:

Tales of Translation is Professor Bhaumik's second book, uncovering a crucial but rarely considered poetic network circulating, not from metropole to colony, but between the Global South/Sur. While continuing to interface political and aesthetic themes, she turns in this book to interpret poetry in transit between Urdu, Bengali, Anglophone, and Spanish languages as a body of political theory at the margins of European modernity. Through archival research and original readings, the project aims to offer a new model of “comparative philology” important for linking theses about decolonization and democracy to avant-garde poetry.

Ksenia Ershova received her PhD in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago and completed her undergraduate studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities. Ksenia is interested in the structural nature of language, with a particular focus on the syntactic and morphological constraints observed in languages with complex morphology. Her research focuses primarily on indigenous languages of the Russian Caucasus and is based on data collected through fieldwork in the region. Ksenia’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Project Summary:

Ksenia’s current project focuses on the syntax of participant encoding in West Circassian, a language spoken in the Republic of Adygea, Russia. The goal of the work is to both provide a comprehensive account of the syntactic structure of West Circassian, and to inform our understanding of cross-linguistic variation in the domain of argument encoding.

Usha Iyer, assistant professor of film and media studies, is the author of Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2020), which examines constructions of gender, stardom, sexuality, and spectacle in Hindi cinema through women’s labor, collaborative networks, and gestural genealogies, producing a corporeal history of South Asian cultural modernities. 

Project Summary:

This book project studies the deep affective engagement of Caribbean spectators with Indian cinema in relation to discourses of belonging and citizenship that have developed around the histories of African enslavement and Indian indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, and Guyana. Examining as well the impact of Caribbean cultural forms on the Indian film industry, the book engages with transnational perspectives on race, ethnicity, performance, and migration to produce a multi-sited analysis of the traffic of sensory, embodied forms of knowledge across informal networks between South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. 

Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung studies politics and aesthetics of modern design with a focus on South Korean and Silicon Valley design. She received her PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2020. Trained in graphic design, Gabrielle also writes on the issues of design and feminism.

Project Summary:

Design as we think of it today is a modern invention. "Modern design," which appeared during the Industrial Revolution to solve the problems of modernity, came to dominate our understanding of design. “Toward a Utopia Without Revolution” questions this prevalent definition of design “as problem-solving” and contends that modern design produced more serious and enduring issues than those it was intended to resolve. This project looks at political and aesthetic problems that modern design projects generated in South Korea, a country that has experienced not only rapid economic development but also immense political progress in less than a century, from the end of the World War II to the beginning of the new millennium.

Sangyop Lee is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford. The focus of his research is the intellectual and institutional history of early Chinese Buddhism. In addition to his dissertation project, he is working on a digital humanities project on the statistical and social network analysis of early Chinese Buddhist hagiographies. 

Project Summary:

Lee's dissertation is about the history and legacy of the soteriological and metaphysical theories developed in the Buddhist discourse on the imperishability of the soul (shen bumie) in early medieval China. By studying these theories in relation to their socio-historical, institutional, hermeneutical, and intellectual context, it newly identifies their unique and central role in the formation of the Chinese Buddhist conception of human nature and religious liberation, and proposes an alternative model of religious propagation that can offer a more satisfactory account of these seemingly non-Buddhist theories’ lasting influence on Chinese Buddhist thought.

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas’ work centers on the reception and circulation of mental health discourses, media technologies, intercultural communication, linguistic analysis, and listening practices. She received her PhD in cultural and linguistic anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book Genres of Listening, Psychoanalysis as a Social Fact in Buenos Aires (under review) is an ethnography of listening practices. It proposes that listening can be categorized into genres: just as there are many ways of speaking, there are many possible ways of listening.

Project summary:

Silencing as Care analyzes interactions between unaccompanied minors from Central America who entered the United States to seek asylum and USCIS officers. My analysis highlights two crucial aspects of these interactions. Marsilli-Vargas’ focuses on how the minors’ narratives are constructed through diverse discursive formats, translations, and media technologies in order to fit the legal category of asylee. Second, I analyze how, sometimes overtly, often implicitly, the concept of care is embedded in these interactions through the juridical principle “the best interest of the child” (BIC), and how it plays a central role in judicial decisions about child welfare and child asylum or legal residency applications.

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.

Carlos Alonso Nugent is a literary, cultural, and environmental historian. He holds a PhD from Yale University, and his articles have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literature, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Modernism/Modernity Print Plus. After spending 2020-21 at Stanford University, he will join the faculty of Vanderbilt University.

Project Summary:

Nugent’s current project is a comparative cultural history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands from 1848 to the present. It focuses on the region’s “imagined environments”—the frameworks through which its human groups have represented, related to, and resided in their more-than-human worlds. Because these imagined environments have influenced aesthetic judgments (e.g. “the Grand Canyon is sublime”) and ethical evaluations (e.g. “the Grand Canyon must be preserved”), they have come to seem normal and even natural. However, they have taken shape through cultural conflicts among Natives, Latinxs, and whites. By showing how these imagined environments have circulated in John Wesley Powell’s essays, María Ruiz de Burton’s novels, Ansel Adams’s photographs, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca’s memoirs, César Chávez’s speeches, and many other media, Carlos’s project charts a new course for the environmental humanities. Along with existing scholarship, it describes how literature has fueled environmental activism—how it has helped us love places we have never been and care for creatures we have never met. At the same time, though, it demonstrates that literature has entrenched environmental unconsciousness—that it has allowed us to disguise (or disregard) our use (and abuse) of the planet.

Shailaja Paik is associate professor ofhHistory at University of Cincinnati and the author of Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). Her scholarship and research interests are concerned with contributing to and furthering the dialogue in human rights, anti-colonial struggles, transnational women’s history, women-of-color feminisms, and particularly on gendering caste, and subaltern history.

Project Summary:

Becoming ‘Vulgar’ offers a multisite and microhistorical analysis of how Indians of various castes and classes paid intensive attention to managing social danger and moral disorder to make “decent” communities. Based on ethnographic and archival research and utilizing hitherto unexamined oral, legal, musical, and performative evidence, alongside vernacular textual sources, my research exposes how vulgarity became a political project for advancing the hegemonic interests and identity of elite Indians in 20th-century Western India.

Jim Reichert is an associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Stanford University. His area of specialization is modern Japanese literature. He has written on representations of male-male sexuality in Meiji-era literature, silent Japanese film, 19th-century illustrated books, newspaper novels, and the role of fetishism in the writing of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō.

Project summary:

Reichert's project considers various permutations of popular Japanese historical fiction from the 1910s to the 1930s. It organizes its examination around the principles of media theory, but endeavors to challenge the technological determinism of that theoretical model by positing genre as a medium, every bit as immersive, disruptive, and pervasive as other forms of new media arising in Japan at that time. Primary materials under consideration include novels, films, essays on mass literature, and translations.

Veronica Shi studied classics at Princeton (BA 2011) and the University of Oxford (MPhil 2013, Worcester College), before arriving at Stanford in 2014.

Project summary:

Shi's project explores the reasoning behind the origin of Western thought in Greece. Instead of seeking explanations for the birth of “reason” or “critical thinking,” it ascribes the long intellectual shadow cast by Greece to the emergence there of an unusual literary culture—an event which, far from occurring in the normal course of a literate society’s development, required an extraordinary series of historical accidents to come about.

Kathryn Starkey’s work focuses on medieval German literature of the 11th to the 13th century. She is the author of Reading the Medieval Book: Word, Image, and Performance in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Willehalm” (Notre Dame, 2004) and A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin's "Welscher Gast" (Notre Dame, 2013).

Project Summary:

The Stuff of Epic Poetry investigates the intersection of medieval poetics, economies of exchange (politics, money, marriage), and material culture in medieval German epic poetry, a literary corpus that emerges for the first time in the second half of the twelfth century (e.g., Tristan, Parzival, the Nibelungenlied). The project focuses particularly on textiles, which take center stage in this literature as metaphor, object, and medium of literary production

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.

Leonardo is a PhD candidate in comparative literature who specializes in early modern literatures and cultures from the Hispanic and Portuguese transatlantic world. He is particularly interested in the framing of colonial spaces as hinterlands in early modern works. His research and teaching interests include the relation between literary and historical discourses, the writing of global and local histories, the interaction between cartographic objects and literature, and comparative approaches to early modernity from the fields of transatlantic, postcolonial, and decolonial studies. Leonardo often combines his specialized engagement with early modern works in Spanish and Portuguese with a comparative approach to sources in Italian, English, Latin, Quechua and, when he feels a bit daring, French and German. He holds a BA and an MA in history from the Federal University of Espirito Santo, Vitoria, Brazil, where he studied from 2007 to 2013.

Project summary:

He is currently writing a dissertation titled Inventing the Hinterlands: Africa in the Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Imaginary in which he examines Miguel Cabello Valboa’s Miscelánea antárctica, André Alvares de Almada’s Tratado breve dos Reinos de Guiné do Cabo Verde, and Luis de Mármol’s Historia de la rebelión y castigo de los moriscos del Reyno de Granada. He analyzes how each of these works mobilize ideas about the African continent in their accounts of South American, West African, and Southern Iberian history. In doing so, he shows how conceptual binaries (such as centre-periphery, global-local, Europe-America and Europe-Africa) cannot grasp the fluidity with which ideas about the different parts of the world appear in the works of early modern writers.

Matthew Wormer is a PhD candidate in British history at Stanford. His research explores the evolution of liberal capitalism in the context of the modern British Empire. He holds a BA in history from Fordham University and an MA in European studies from Yale University.

Project summary:

Matthew’s dissertation is a study of the British opium trade in South and East Asia from the late 18th century to the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839. Combining East India Company records with hitherto unknown papers from Calcutta mercantile firms, it traces how shifting understandings of economic value reshaped struggles between state officials, private traders, and Indian laborers over the control and distribution of profits from the emerging global traffic in narcotic drugs.