Janice Ross (theater and performance studies, ITALIC Director)
Professor Ross works in Dance Studies, with a particular interest in the social and cultural importance of dance historically and in the contemporary moment. Her research interests include Dance in Prison and Ballet in Soviet Russia, subjects that have more in common than one might think.
Kim Beil (ITALIC Associate Director / Lecturer)
Dr. Beil is a scholar of visual culture, with an emphasis on the history of photography. Her research concentrates on the ways in which photographic techniques are made to represent subjective experience. Current projects focus on popular uses of photography in the postwar United States, including an exploration of color photographs of modern architecture, as well as a study of the use of blur to represent speed and individuality in automotive advertising.
Nicholas Jenkins (english) 2015-2016
Professor Jenkins is the Primary Investigator for Kindred Britain, described by the Economist as "an amazing digital humanities website that traces relations between 30,000 British people.” He has edited a Lincoln Kirstein Reader and co-edited and contributed to three volumes of Oxford University Press's "Auden Studies" series. He is General Editor of the Princeton University Press's "Facing Pages" translation series, and he has contributed essays and reviews to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Raritan and the Yale Review. Jenkins is Co-Chair of the W. H. Auden Society and the Literary Executor of the poet, scholar and impresario Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder with George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet.
Richard Meyer (art and art history) 2015-2016
Richard Meyer is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on American art, the history of photography, censorship and the first amendment, and feminist and queer studies. He is the author, most recently, of What Was Contemporary Art?, a history of the idea of contemporary art in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century and co-author, with Catherine Lord, of Art and Queer Culture, a global study of the dialog between visual art and non-normative sexualities from 1885 to the present. Meyer also wrote Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art which was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As a guest curator, he organized Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered at the Jewish Museum in New York and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco (2008) and Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2011-2012).
Stephen M. Sano (music) 2015-2016
Stephen M. Sano is Professor and Chair of the Department of Music, and the Harold C. Schmidt Director of Choral Studies at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Chamber Chorale and Symphonic Chorus. He holds master's and doctoral degrees in both orchestral and choral conducting from Stanford, and a bachelor's degree in piano performance and theory from San Jose State University.
James Steichen (pwr lecturer)
Dr. Steichen’s research concerns the history of the performing arts in twentieth-century America. Current projects include a book on the early years of the ballet enterprise of choreographer George Balanchine and impresario Lincoln Kirstein and ongoing research into the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” cinema broadcast initiative. He holds a PhD in musicology from Princeton University.
Scott Wallin (italic lecturer)
Dr. Wallin has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His primary work merges contemporary theater and disability studies and builds upon a background in directing for the stage, acting, and psychiatric social work on both coasts. He has also worked internationally in community development and conducted research in social practice and Caribbean performance. His current book project, Madness in the Making: Psychosocial Disability and Theater, examines how theater reflects and influences our understandings of madness and mental illness. Other interests include applying performance theory across the arts, postdramatic theater, affect theory, and critical race studies.
Jonathan Berger (music) 2013-2015
Jonathan Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music. His work (at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics) elides music composition and research on the perception and cognition of music.
Scott Bukatman (art and art history) 2013-2015
Professor Bukatman teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program, and his research highlights the ways in which popular media (film, comics) and genres (science fiction, musicals, superhero narratives) mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His latest book is The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, and it makes a great gift.
