Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Rachel Jacoff is Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature and Professor of Italian at Wellesley College where she has been a member the faculty since 1978. She has also taught at the University of Virginia, Cornell University, and Stanford University. She received her B.A. with High Honors and Distinction in 1959 from Cornell University, an M.A. in English f...

Rachel Jacoff: Hell Is Other People in Dante's Inferno Rachel Jacoff is one of the leading lights in the small, close-knit world of Dante scholarship. In this Entitled Opinions episode on The Divine Comedy, she continues her conversation on The Inferno, with her former student, our Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison, himself a major Dante scholar. Harrison begins by citing Homer's Illiad: "As...

The Only Way Up is Down: Rachel Jacoff on Dante's Inferno The world of Dante scholars is a small and close-knit one, and Rachel Jacoff is one of its leading luminaries. In this Entitled Opinions conversation, she discusses The Divine Comedy, and more particularly The Inferno, with her former student, our Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison, himself a major Dante scholar. They begin with the set...

Irish novelist and journalist Colm Toibin was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in Ireland in 1955 and was educated at University College Dublin where he read History and English. After graduating, he lived and taught in Barcelona, a city that he later wrote about in Homage to Barcelona (1990). He returned to Ireland and worked as a journalist before travelling through South America and Argentina....

Drew Gibson is a principal of Gibson Speno, LLC, a real estate investment and investment company.  The company owned approximately 1,800 apartment units and has also developed approximately 7,000 residential lots in the San Jose area over the past 8 years.  He is also a Director and co-owner of Preferred Community Management, Inc., a real estate management company.  From 1973 to 1985, he held the...

Pianist and composer Ken Berman has appeared on the famed stages of Carnegie Hall in New York, Detroit's Fox Theater, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and The Sunside in Paris; he's equally at home in the bohemian grooves of the Knitting Factory and Smoke. Ken Berman has performed and recorded with Bob Moses, John Lockwood, Yoron Israel, Bob Gullotti, Jaleel Shaw, Take Toriyama and others: he’s b...

Bissera Pentcheva is Assitant Professor of Art History at Stanford University. She received her B. A. from Dartmouth College and Ph. D. from the Dept. of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She was a pre-doctoral fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute at Washington D.C., a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University at the Department of Art History and Archaeology and a...

Dr. Michael Hendrickson is Professor of Pathology at the Stanford University Medical School and Director Surgical Pathology Laboratory at the Stanford Medical Center. His research interests in this field include: diagnosis of progressive stages of uterine cancer; classification of ovarian tumors; breast cancer diagnosis and prognostic factors, soft tissue neoplasm, uterine mesenchymal neoplasm. In...

Dr. Michael Hendrickson is Professor of Pathology at the Stanford University Medical School and Director Surgical Pathology Laboratory at the Stanford Medical Center. His research interests in this field include: diagnosis of progressive stages of uterine cancer; classification of ovarian tumors; breast cancer diagnosis and prognostic factors, soft tissue neoplasm, uterine mesenchymal neoplasm. In...

Professor Marjorie Perloff is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford and Scholar in Residence at USC. She was educated at Barnard College, where she received her B.A. (1953) and at the Catholic University of America where she received her Ph. D. in English (1965). She teaches courses and writes on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts...

Professor Sullivan is the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford University. She received a B.A. from Cornell in 1976 and a B.A. from Oxford in 1978 where she was a Marshall Scholar. She received her J.D. from Harvard in 1981. Her broad experience in the practice of law includes being a clerk to Judge James L. Oakes on the U.S. Court of Appeals (1981-82), an attorney in a constitutional app...

Thomas Sheehan has been Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford since 1999. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Loyola University of Chicago since 1972. He received his B.A. from St. Patrick's College and his Ph. D. from Fordham University. He has been the recipient of many academic honors including: Ford Foundation Fellow (1983-85), Resident Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (1983), N...

  Thomas Sheehan has been Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford since 1999. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Loyola University of Chicago since 1972. He received his B.A. from St. Patrick's College and his Ph. D. from Fordham University. He has been the recipient of many academic honors including: Ford Foundation Fellow (1983-85), Resident Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (1983),...

A former student at the École Normale Supérieure rue d’Ulm, Professor Alduy received her Ph. D. in French Literature from the University of Reims in June 2003, where she wrote her dissertation on Renaissance poetry. Entitled “Nation, Self, and the Lure of Unity. Poetics and Genesis of a New French Genre, the “Amours” (France, 1544-1560)," her dissertation examined how the poetics of love sonnets c...

Seth Lerer holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University, a B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University, and he received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in 1981. He joined the Stanford faculty as Professor of English in 1990, received a joint appointment in Comparative Literature in 1996, and served as Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 1997-2000. He is currently the Avalon Foundati...

Decca is the host of At the Cafe Bohemian, a world music show on KZSU, Stanford, where she is also the Public Affairs Director. She received a B.A. in Classics and an M.A. in Art History from San Francisco State University. When not on the air she can usually be found in a bookstore, a music store, or eating popcorn in the Stanford Theatre.

Thomas Harrison is Professor of Italian at UCLA, where he has been since 1994. He recieved his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and his M.Phil. and Ph. D in Comparative Literature from CUNY. Before joining the faculty of UCLA in 1994 he taught in Italian and comparative literature programs at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Uta...

Dr. Marilyn Yalom grew up in Washington D.C. and was educated at Wellesley College, the Sorbonne, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She has been married to the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom for fifty years and is the mother of four children and the grandmother of five. She has been a professor of French and comparative literature, director of an institute for research on women, a popular speaker on the lectur...

Paul R. Ehrlich received his Ph. D. from the University of Kansas. Co-founder with Peter H. Raven of the field of coevolution, he has pursued long-term studies of the structure, dynamics, and genetics of natural butterfly populations. He has also been a pioneer in alerting the public to the problems of overpopulation, and in raising issues of population, resources, and the environment as matters o...

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...

Thomas Sheehan has been Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford since 1999. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Loyola University of Chicago since 1972. He received his B.A. from St. Patrick's College and his Ph. D. from Fordham University. He has been the recipient of many academic honors including: Ford Foundation Fellow (1983-85), Resident Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (1983), N...

Kathryn Todd is a graduate student in the Physics Department at Stanford University. She completed her B.S. in Physics and Literature at Caltech in 2001. She is also the current Program Director at KZSU 90.1 FM.

Gregory Freidin is Professor of Slavic at Stanford University. He was educated first in the USSR and then went on to receive his M.A. and Ph. D. from the University of California - Berkeley in 1979 with a thesis on Osip Mandelstam. He has been at Stanford since 1978. He was chair of the Slavic Department from 1994-1997 and from 1998-2001, directed the Center for Russion, East-European, and Eurasio...