Contact Information
Nicole Lopez Stengel
SLE Lecturer
nlopez@stanford.edu
Biography
Nicole Lopez Stengel is in her fourth year as a Lecturer in Stanford University’s Program in Structured Liberal Education (SLE). She received her PhD in Italian Literature from Stanford University. Her dissertation, entitled La poetica dell’oggetto: The Objects in Eugenio Montale’s Le occasioni, explores the poetic emphasis in the 20th century on materiality, ultimately considering the experimental ways in which the phenomenal is used to encounter the metaphysical. She also holds an MA from Stanford in Italian and an AB with Honors in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. At Harvard, she specialized in Italian literature with a citation in French (cinema & francophone literature). Her honor’s thesis was a single-author study on the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello and is entitled, The Shattered Mirror: Fragmentation of the Self in Pirandello’s Uno, nessuno e centomila.
Nicole works on modernism (specialization: Italy). Among other interests, she is currently researching the role of the beloved, the muse and the exile in modern literature. She is working on two book manuscripts. “Forgive My Prose”: The Epistolary-Poetics of The Brandeis Books looks at the role of letter writing in the Montalean poetic. The other is entitled, The Poetics of the Object: Modern Ktisis and The Necessary Counter-Myths of the 1930s and aims at analyzing the ways in which poets writing during the rise of 20th century political regimes construct the realm of the everyday to resist modern, foundational myths. Archival research for her projects has been made possible through The Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Carnegie Mellon Foundation, Le Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, and the Archivio Contemporaneo in the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence, Italy.
From the teaching standpoint, Nicole has taught a range of courses both within and outside of her specialization. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, she taught a course on Boccaccio in Italian in the Medieval Italian Literature sequence and directed three Senior Seminar theses. She has taught all levels of Italian language in addition to a poetry course on the thematics of Italian poetry. On the French side of things, she was a Teaching Assistant for Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès’ course entitled, Images of Women in French Cinema: 1930-1990.
At Stanford, as a Lecturer in the Program in Structured Liberal Education, Nicole is teaching the "great books" in a year-long sequence for freshmen. SLE is an opportunity for her to teach both a chronologically structured curriculum from the ancient world to the modern period and the fundamentals of writing. She greatly enjoys teaching at the little gem called SLE that provides the liberal arts college atmosphere within a large, research university.
Ever evolving her research and acquisition of languages, Nicole is fluent in English, Spanish, Italian, and French. However, she can also hold a pretty good conversation in Wolof and Armenian. Outside of the classroom, she writes fiction, is a seamstress and plays the harmonica.
