Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

KATIE PETERSON was born in Menlo Park, California. She graduated from Stanford in 1996 with a degree in English Literature, and received her doctorate in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 2006. Her thesis, "Supposed Person: Emily Dickinson and the Selflessness of Poetry," was awarded the Howard Mumford Jones Prize for best thesis the year of its completion. Pe...

PANAGIOTIS AGAPITOS (Athens, 1959), Professor of Byzantine Literature and Culture at the University of Cyprus, studied Byzantine History and Literature, History of Byzantine Art and Musicology at the University of Munich (M.A. 1984), and Byzantine Literature at Harvard University (Ph. D 1990). He has published Narrative Structure in the Byzantine Vernacular Romances (Munich 1991), The Study of Med...

PANAGIOTIS AGAPITOS (Athens, 1959), Professor of Byzantine Literature and Culture at the University of Cyprus, studied Byzantine History and Literature, History of Byzantine Art and Musicology at the University of Munich (M.A. 1984), and Byzantine Literature at Harvard University (Ph. D 1990). He has published Narrative Structure in the Byzantine Vernacular Romances (Munich 1991), The Study […]

ANDREW J. MITCHELL is assistant professor of Philosophy at Emory University specializing in the work of Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the continental philosophical tradition, as well as the relationships between philosophy and literature. Before joining Emory he was post-doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University where he taught in the German Studies and Philosophy depar...

JOSHUA LANDY is associate professor of French and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford. Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford University Press, 2004) and the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secu...

MARÍLIA LIBRANDI ROCHA specializes in Brazilian literature and culture within a comparative framework. She is particularly focused on the modern period, from the nineteenth century to the present. She was born in São Paulo, where she earned her MA and PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universidade de São Paulo. From 2004-2008, she taught in the Department of Linguistics an...

ADRIAN DAUB is Assistant Professor of German at Stanford University. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College in 2003 and his Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. His current book project is entitled Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in Early German Idealism and Jena Romanticism, 1794-1801, and he is also the author of a German language study...

Denise Gigante, Associate Professor of English, teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature with a focus on Romanticism. Her books include Taste: A Literary History (Yale UP, 2005), Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005), The Great Age of the English Essay: An Anthology (Yale UP, 2008), and Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale UP, 2009). S...

Stephen Hinton is Professor of Music and Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has been on the faculty since 1994; from 1997-2004 he served as chairman of the Department of Music. After studying at the University of Birmingham (U.K.), where he took both a double major in Music and German and a Ph. D. in Musicology, he spent eight years at the Technische Universi...

Stephen Hinton is Professor of Music and Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has been on the faculty since 1994; from 1997-2004 he served as chairman of the Department of Music. After studying at the University of Birmingham (U.K.), where he took both a double major in Music and German and a Ph. D. in Musicology, he spent eight years at the Technische Universi...

Professor Michel Serres was born in 1930 in Agen, France. In 1949, he went to naval college and subsequently, in 1952, to the Ecole Normale Supérieure (rue d'Ulm). In 1955, he obtained an agrégation in philosophy, and from 1956 to 1958 he served on a variety of ships as a marine officer for the French national maritime service. His vocation of voyaging is therefore of more than academic import. In...

Matthew Farley, S.J. is a Jesuit who teaches English at Saint Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco, CA. He holds a B.A. from Stanford in English and Masters degrees in Theology and Philosophy, from the University of Notre Dame, and Fordham University, respectively. He has engaged in a variety of missionary works in his Jesuit training, including work with the Missionaries of Charity in Ja...

As a scholar of international and comparative law, legal philosophy, and human rights, Helen Stacy has produced works analyzing the efficacy of regional courts in promoting human rights, differences in the legal systems of neighboring countries, and the impact of postmodernism on legal thinking. Her recent scholarship has focused on how international and regional human rights courts can improve hu...

Peter Stansky is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford University, where has taught since 1968. Stansky specializes in modern British history and he has served as the director of the Stanford Humanities Center. Author of innumerable publications, including Redesigning the World, William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts (1985), On or About December 1910: Ear...

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, where he has worked since leaving MCI in 2005. At Google, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced Internet-based products and services from Google. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet […]

Joshua Landy is Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. He has written Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and has edited, with Thomas Pavel and Claude Bremond, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1994). This is his first appearance as host of Entitled Opinions. He was a guest of the show in 2005, discussing Marcel Proust with Robert Harrison....

Abraham Verghese, MD and MACP, is Professor in Stanford's Department of Medicine, and Senior Associate Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine. He previously served for five years as Director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas. He is the author of two bestselling books: My Own Country: A Doctor's Story details his experiences in displacement, diaspora,...

Heather Webb specializes in the literature and cultural history of medieval and Renaissance Italy. Areas of research include Dante, early Italian lyric poetry, devotional poetry and prose and history of the body. Her book manuscript, entitled The Medieval Heart: Circulation before William Harvey, is currently under review. She has published essays on Giovanni da San Gimignano's analysis of sensory...

Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1945, and educated at the universities of Cambridge (B.A. and M.A. in English Literature) and Manchester (PhD. in Medieval Persian Literature). He lived in Iran for 8 years (1970-1978), and also for some time in both Italy and Greece. He is currently Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State...

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature, of French & Italian, of Spanish & Portuguese (by courtesy), and is affiliated with German Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. He is also Professeur Associé au Département de Littérature comparée at the Université de Montréal, Directeur d'étud...

Nicholas Jenkins writes about and teaches 20th-century culture and literature, especially poetry. After receiving his B.A. from Oxford, Jenkins came to the United States as a Harkness Fellow. He did postgraduate work at Columbia and was then employed as an editor and writer at ARTnews magazine in New York. He received a D.Phil. from Oxford and, after teaching in the Harvard English Department for...

Paul Robinson works on the history of European (and sometimes American) thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. His writing has focused on three topics. The first is the history of psychoanalysis. The second is the history of ideas about human sexuality, especially the experience of gays and lesbians. The third is the connection between intellectual history and the history of opera. He his the aut...

Lanier Anderson was educated at Yale (A.B., 1987) and the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., Ph. D., 1993). He works in the history of late modern philosophy, focusing primarily on Kant and his influence on 19th c. philosophy. He is the author of articles on Kant's theoretical philosophy, on Nietzsche, and on the neo-Kantian movement. He is currently working on a book about the analytic/synthetic d...