R. Lanier Anderson (Professor, Philosophy) is a historian of late modern philosophy. He is the author of The Poverty of Conceptual Truth (OUP, 2015) and many articles on Kant and Nietzsche. His research at the Center will include work on Nietzsche’s moral psychology, Montaigne, and the relations between philosophy and literature. 

 

 

Project Summary: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is famous both for his corrosive critique of cherished values, and for his incisive psychological analyses. The two strands are tightly connected, since his most prominent critical arguments are grounded in psychological claims. My project aims to elucidate Nietzsche’s psychology. A fuller understanding of what is compelling about Nietzschean moral psychology promises to help explain the continuing grip of Nietzsche’s writing on us, despite its stark rejection of values we care about, and it may also promote a deeper self-understanding about who we are as valuing creatures.

Bernard Bate explores the theory, ethnography, and history of political oratory and rhetoric in the Tamil worlds of South Asia. The author of Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic, (Columbia, 2009/Oxford India, 2011), he is a member of the inaugural faculty of Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore.

 

Project Summary: This work offers a genealogy of Tamil political oratory and the emergence of vernacular politics in the Tamil-speaking lands of India and Sri Lanka. The book argues that sermonic genres introduced by Protestant missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fused with culturally and historically deeper forms and aesthetics of language, provided the communicative infrastructure that enabled a new kind of agent, the vernacular politician, to address and mobilize a modern Tamil people within a distinctive social imaginary.

Lisa Burnett is a Ph.d candidate in musicology at Stanford University. She has an M. Mus. from Boston University in music history and literature and a JD from Harvard Law School. Her research interests include Wagner, music and politics, and the aesthetics of large-scale stage works across cultures.

 

Jason Cieply is a PhD Candidate in Slavic at Stanford. His dissertation focuses on the mobilization of revolutionary affect in early Soviet culture. His research interests also include the place of authorial silence in the polyphonic novel and the reception of politically engaged poetic performance in contemporary Russia.

 

Cieply’s dissertation addresses the mutual determination of affect, ideology, and literary voice in Soviet culture. He explores how two writers, Andrei Platonov and Mikhail Zoshchenko, used the classical trope of speaking in tongues to create artificial “proletarian” voices intended to portray the developing revolutionary consciousness of the new Soviet person.

David F. Driscoll is a Ph.D. candidate in the Stanford Department of Classics. He has a BA from Grinnell College in classics and physics and an MA from the University of Georgia in classical languages. His research interests include Homer and ancient Homeric reception, Classical and Imperial Greek prose, and archaic Greek poetry.

 

Project summary: Driscoll’s dissertation project, “Acting the Exegete: Homeric Quotation and Interpretation in Imperial Literary Symposia,” analyzes the surprisingly common presence of Homer in Imperial literary symposia, i.e. fictionalized evening conversation during the early Roman Empire. Building on Bourdieuan analysis to treat these quotations from the standpoint of performance, it argues that through the societally approved use of Homer elites both justify their privileged position and establish their own internal hierarchy.

Jenna Gibbs is associate professor of revolutionary-era Atlantic history at Florida International University. Her first book, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760s–1850s, was published in 2014.  She is working on her second monograph, Evangelicalism, Slavery, and Empire: The Global Latrobe Family, 1750s–1850s.

 

Project summary: "Evangelicalism, Slavery, and Empire: The Global Latrobe Family" is a global story told through three generations of the Latrobes, a family of French Huguenot descent who, after being expelled from France in the late 17th century, converted to the German evangelical Moravian sect. Multi-generational members of this Moravian family were directly complicit with world-wide imperial ventures as immigrants, missionaries, and British and American government officials. In these varied capacities, they travelled and migrated literally across the globe between the mid- 18th and mid-19th centuries: to Ireland, Great Britain, the West Indies, North America, India, South Africa, Australia, and beyond. Her micro-history of three generations of this global missionizing family will provide an intimate view of the macro-story of British, American, and German evangelicals’ involvement with slavery, indigenous peoples, and empire between the 1750s- and 1850s.

Niloofar Haeri is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and the Director of the Program in Islamic Studies. She is a linguistic anthropologist who works on Iran and Egypt. She is the author of Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt (2003) and co-editor of Langue, religion et modernité dans l’space Musulman contemporain (2008). She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Stanford Center for Humanities fellowship in 2015-2016 for her project on the work of prayer and poetry in the lives of a group of women in Tehran, Iran.

 

Jennifer Iverson is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Iowa. She researches and writes about the mid-century European musical avant-garde, connections between electronic and acoustic music, and disability studies in music.

 

This project explores the impact of the WDR (West German Radio) electronic music studio on the post-war European musical avant-garde in the critical decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The rise of electronic music at mid-century is deeply engaged with broader cultural questions about the role of technology in institutions, art, and life. This book reveals that electronic music made at the WDR drove the development of mid-century acoustic classical music, and shaped the proliferation of technology in post-war culture more broadly.

Christopher B. Krebs studied classics and philosophy in Berlin, Kiel (1st Staatsexamen 2000, PhD 2003), and Oxford (M. St. 2002). He taught at University College Oxford and Harvard before joining Stanford’s Classics department, and held visiting positions at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich. He is the co-editor (with John Moles) of Histos and the recipient of the 2012 Christian Gauss Award.

 

He works in the fields of intellectual history, Greek and Roman historiography, and Latin philology and currently on a commentary on Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum 7 (Cambridge University Press) as well as A History of Ideas of the Roman Republic (W.W. Norton). His co-edited Cambridge Companion to Caesar should appear in the fall of 2016 with his contributions on “Caesar: A Style of Choice” and “More than Words: The Commentarii in their Propagandistic Context.” Other work includes "Caesar's Sisenna" (Classical Quarterly) and “The buried tradition of programmatic titulature among republican historians: Polybius’ Πραγματεία, Asellio’s Res Gestae, and Sisenna’s redefinition of Historiae" (American Journal of Philology). He has appeared on television and radio and occasionally reviews for the Wall Street Journal.

Katharina N. Piechocki is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where she specializes in early modern European literature. Her research interests include cartography, translation studies, philology, gender studies, opera, theater, as well as world cinema. Her most recent article, “Syphilologies,” is forthcoming in Comparative Literature.

 

Project Summary: "Cartographic Humanism: Defining Early Modern Europe, 1390-1590" is as much a reexamination of the idea of Europe as it is a critical analysis of Renaissance humanism’s complex articulations of space and language. The first attempt to problematize the question of Europe’s borders through the lens of cartography, philology, and translation as interlocking humanistic practices, this project traces new itineraries from Italy to islands in the Atlantic Ocean, from Portugal to Africa’s Western coast, from Poland to the Crimean Peninsula.

Gabriella Safran, the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies, teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford. Her most recent book, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk's Creator, S. An-sky, is a biography of an early-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish writer who was also an ethnographer, a revolutionary, and a wartime relief worker.

 

Project summary: From the 1830s to the 1910s, the Russian peasant voice was collected by writers, lexicographers, ethnographers, and musicologists and curated for consumption at home and abroad. This monograph considers the late imperial collectors of peasant sound as listeners, positing that the "outsiderly" status of the ethnographic ear in Russia and the state’s position as omnipresent eavesdropper enhanced the sense that Russian sound was inaccessible. It re-reads Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, while thinking through ways in which nineteenth-century Russian culture was constructed in relation to the demands of global audiences.