Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Aishwary Kumar is assistant professor of history at Stanford and works as an intellectual and political historian of modern South Asia.  He works in areas of legal and political thought, political philosophy and democratic culture, religion, caste, and moral psychology, in addition to global histories of empire, constitutionalism, and citizenship.  A parallel set of his interests concerns the form...

Werner Herzog is one of the most important film directors of the past half-century. He has directed nearly twenty feature films, including such masterpieces as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. He has also directed dozens of influential documentaries, including many acclaimed recent films such as Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the […]

Hans Ulrich ("Sepp") Gumbrecht is an internationally renowned scholar who is the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. In his scholarship, he focuses on the histories of the national literatures in Romance language (especially French, Spanish, and Brazilian), but also on German literature while, at the same time teaching and writing on the Western philosophical tradition w...

Dr. Rebecca Pekron recently received her doctorate from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University.   Her dissertation "Que reste-t-il? [What remains?]"  Poetic Approaches to Immortality:  Baudelaire and After explores the concept of immortality in the funerary poetry of the nineteenth century.   Dr. Pekron graduated from Stanford in 2005 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and an M.A. in...

After receiving his Ph. D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1980, Eric Roberts taught at Wellesley College from 1980-85, where he chaired the Computer Science Department. From 1985-90, he was a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California, where his research focused on programming tools for multiprocessor architec...

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...

Niklas Damiris is a natural philosopher, trained in biophysics, who has of late taken a turn toward social theory to investigate money’s role in organizing human existence. He is adjunct professor at the University of Lugano in Switzerland, and a visiting scholar at Stanford, where he recently gave a course on the philosophy of money. […]

Marilynne Robinson and the Perception of the Ordinary Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson is considered one of the defining writers of our time, a treasure in contemporary American literature, in both her fiction and her non-fiction. Her novels explore mid-20th century Midwestern life and faith; her essays roam the boundaries between faith and science. She is perhaps best known for he...

Thomas Ryckman is a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Columbia in 1986 and taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern, and UC-Berkeley, before ultimately coming to Stanford. His main area of research is the philosophy of science, specifically the philosophy of physics. He has published scores of papers in this field, al...

Dr. Ruth Starkman has been teaching writing and ethics since 1986. She is the writing specialist for Stanford's Dept of Computer Science and teaches courses like "The Rhetoric of Biomedical Ethics" and "Science, Democracy and Social Media." In addition to teaching and tutoring students, she writes on ethics, political theory, medicine, science, and higher education. She edited the volume Transform...

Hans Sluga is the William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy at UC-Berkeley, where he has taught since 1970. In addition to numerous essays, Professor Sluga has published various important books including "Gottlob Frege" (Routledge, 1980, later reprinted and translated into Chinese and Greek), "Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany" (Harvard University Press, 1993), "T...

Hans Sluga is the William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy at UC-Berkeley, where he has taught since 1970. In addition to numerous essays, Professor Sluga has published various important books including "Gottlob Frege" (Routledge, 1980, later reprinted and translated into Chinese and Greek), "Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany" (Harvard University Press, 1993), "T...

Edward Feigenbaum is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he was also co-director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory. He received his PhD from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1960, working under the supervision of Herbert Simon and developing EPAM, "Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer." He is considered one of the fathers of "exp...

Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at UC-Berkeley, Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC) and former Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). He is the author of many important books on Michel Foucault and on a variety of topics of anthropological and philosophical interest. A full list of his many pu...

Jessica Merrill holds a Ph. D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California-Berkeley. She is currently Mellon Fellow (2013–2015) in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford. Her book project focuses on the intellectual history of modern literary theory and the emergence of the Russian Formalist and Czech Structuralist movements.  In addition to literary theory, her sch...

Monika Greenleaf is a comparative literature scholar who teaches in the Department of Slavic and the Department of Comparative Literature here at Stanford. She is of Polish extraction herself and specializes in Polish and Russian literature. She is the author of Pushkin and Romantic Fashion as well as editor of Russian Subjects: Nation, Empire, and the Culture of Russia's Golden Age. Her forthcomi...

Karol Berger is the Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of Music at Stanford University and is also Affiliated Faculty with the Department of German and the Europe Center at Stanford.   He received his PhD at Yale and taught at Boston University before coming to Stanford in 1982.   He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Alexander von Humboldt...

Karol Berger is the Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of Music at Stanford University and is also Affiliated Faculty with the Department of German and the Europe Center at Stanford. He received his PhD at Yale and taught at Boston University before coming to Stanford in 1982. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Alexander von Humboldt Fou...

Mark McGurl is a professor in the Department of English at Stanford, where he teaches postwar and contemporary American literature. He has taught at Stanford since 2011, having previously taught at UCLA. He received his BA from Harvard and his PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1998. He has held fellowships from the Office of the President of the University of California and from the Stanford Humanities Ce...

David Lummus is currently Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University. Prof. Lummus specializes in late medieval and early modern Italian literature and intellectual history. His research and teaching interests include fourteenth-century literature in Latin and the vernacular, Renaissance Humanism, medieval and early modern mythography, and the pastoral tradition. He explores...

Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), the Australian Catholic University and the University of Nice. He is the author of over 20 books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or co-edited 14 m...

Gregory "Grisha" Freidin is professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. He received his PhD from UC-Berkeley in 1979, writing a dissertation on Osip Mandelstam. He has taught at Stanford since then, and has, in that time, distinguished himself as scholar, teacher, and administrator. He has edited and translated many important volumes, including The Norton Critical Edition...

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She received her BA from Vassar College and her MA and PhD from Princeton University. She has taught at East Anglia since 1999. She is the author of widely discussed books including The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe and, most recently, Careless People: Murder, Hayhem, an...