Colleen Anderson studies the history, culture, and technology of Cold War Germany. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2017 and has received funding from the American Historical Association & NASA, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, DAAD, the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, and the Central European History Society.

Project Summary:

This project studies Germans’ participation in and imaginations about outer space exploration during the Cold War. The manuscript traces the changing ways in which East and West Germans saw their own futures as connected to space travel and in which Germans used outer space to address their pasts and envision their roles in the world around them.

Rebekah Baglini received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2015. Baglini's research, growing out of her dissertation “Stative Predication and Semantic Ontology,” centers on lexical semantics and cross-linguistic variation.  Of special interest is the way that languages encode 'stative concepts'—a set of universal concepts relating to abstract properties realized by entities in the world, including dimension, age, speed, value, and color. Baglini was the Bloch Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, from March 2011 to March 2013 and previously worked as a Visiting Lecturer in Linguistics at UC San Diego. Her dissertation fieldwork on Wolof in Senegal was supported by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.  

Heather-Roby studies the novel and the history of science. She received her PhD from Harvard University in English, her MPhil from University of Cambridge in history and philosophy of science, and her AB from Harvard in History and Literature; before coming to Stanford, she was a Junior Research Fellow at University of Cambridge.

Project Summary:

Reason’s Stories: Type, Example, Paradigm explores the narratives latent in three central logical modes and considers how nineteenth-century novelists, scientists, philosophers, and social reformers used those implied structures of experience. It shows how conceptual orderings become unspoken stories that shadow and shape the spoken ones.

Willie Costello received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 2015. Costello specializes in ancient Greek philosophy, with particular interests in ancient Greek metaphysics and Plato. His main body of research explores how ancient thinkers from the Presocratics to Aristotle sought to explain the structure and composition of ordinary objects. He is especially interested in clarifying how Plato fits into this tradition, and showing how Plato's conception of Forms was developed against this background. He is currently developing this work into a monograph, titled The causal origins of Plato's Forms: The natural philosophy of the Phaedo and its context.

Lukas Dovern is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Stanford. He holds a BA and an MA in History from the University of Münster, Germany. Studying the region of Eastern Europe from a transnational perspective, his research interests include the Cold War, globalization, finance, and socialist economies.

Project Summary:

Drawing on the example of socialist Poland and its ties to internationally operating financial institutions, Dovern investigates the role of finance in the Cold War. In his dissertation, he shows that studying Eastern Europe solely within the framework of Soviet politics and the bipolarity of the Cold War omits a crucial part of its international history; worldwide patterns of globalization, not just the rhythm of superpower politics, are equally important to understand the region’s history 

David E. Gilbert is a Ph.D. Candidate in Stanford's department of Anthropology. He specializes in the study of the political economy of environmental change, agrarian livelihoods, and social movements. He has lived and worked in Sumatra, Indonesia, on and off, since 2007. 

Project Summary:

Building on fourteen months of research in Sumatra's Bukit Barisan mountain range, Gilbert integrates ethnographic, archival and landscape ecology methods to illuminate how one group of agriculturalists was able to reclaim a ruined industrial cattle ranch and plantation to cultivate diverse, environmentally-attune livelihoods. Elaborating a particularly modern integration of livelihood, politics and ecology, this particular group of agriculturalists work to support their own well-being, as well as that of thousands of species of more than human life. 

Shawon Kinew received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in 2016. She was a Predoctoral Fellow in the Scholars Program at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2015-2016) and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Institutional Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome from 2013-2015.

Project Summary:

Kinew's book project is called The Vision in Stone: Melchiorre Cafa in the World, 1636-1667. Her research on the Maltese sculptor Melchiorre Cafà explores how a sculptural softness cultivated in hard stone emerged as predominant aesthetic category in the seventeenth century. Through Cafà’s sculpture of the first saint of the Americas, Rose of Lima—carved in 1665 and sent to Peru in 1670—she explores the process by which a local Roman artistic discourse was adapted for a globalizing Catholic world.

Glory is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science with research interests in the history of political thought, economic thought, and American politics. She holds a BA in political economy and classics from UC Berkeley, and MPhils in political thought and classics from Cambridge University.  She is also a semi-professional contemporary ballet dancer.

Project Summary: 

Liu's dissertation traces the reception of Adam Smith's ideas in American thought, culture and politics from the eighteenth century to the present.  In showing how certain of Smith's ideas became politically salient over time, Liu's project sheds light on the changing nature of intellectual authority and the role that economic ideas play in American politics. 

Elizabeth Jacqueline Marcus completed her Ph.D. in French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2017, and received her BA in Modern History and French at the University of Oxford. Elizabeth's research focuses on the literatures and​ ​cultural​ ​history of the Francophone​ ​and Arab​ ​world, with a particular interest in multilingualism, intellectual networks and migration in the postcolonial context. She has been a Visiting Scholar at MIT, and at Sciences-Po (Paris). In addition to her formal training, she has studied and conducted research in France, the UK, Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

Project Summary:

Her ​book project​ sheds light on the shifting stakes of language diversity and cultural politics in post-independence Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world. It looks at ​how​ ​the disciplines of law, social sciences and literature co-constituted one another​​ in local negotiations over inherited structures of knowledge.​ This work brings Lebanon and its linguistic and religious politics into a wider frame of scholarship on education, decolonisation and multilingualism.​ ​She is also working on a second project which examines the cultural and political roles of the university and international students in France during the Trente Glorieuses (1945—1975). Recovering the history of the Cité internationale universitaire, an international university campus set on the outskirts of Paris, ​she ​look​s​ at how it became a key physical and symbolic space for students, writers and intellectuals from the Middle East, Africa and Europe. 

Richard Meyer is Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford. Recent books include What was Contemporary Art? and, with Catherine Lord, Art and Queer Culture.  His first book, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art received the Charles C. Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian. 

Project Summary:

A Brooklyn tailor and slipper manufacturer who took up art at the age of 65, Morris Hirshfield created wildly stylized paintings of animals, landscapes, and often-nude female figures.  My project, the first book-length study of the painter, presents Hirshfield as a key figure within the emergent construction of the “modern primitive” artist in the 1940s.

Aileen Robinson received an Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama from Northwestern University in 2016.  Her current project explores the contribution of theatre and magic performance to emerging practices of science communication in the nineteenth century. She investigates how theatrical performances and magic shows drew upon technological innovations and formed unique methods for disseminating scientific knowledge. She conducted archival research in Britain and the United States supported through an SSRC International Dissertation Fellowship and an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

Read a Q&A about Robinson's work. 

Luca Scholz is an historian of early modern Europe. He pursued his doctoral studies in History at the European University Institute (Florence). His research is concerned with the governance of inter-polity mobility. Before coming to Stanford, he taught for one term at the Free University of Berlin. Luca studied History and Economics in Heidelberg and Paris and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Saint Andrews and at Columbia University.

Project Summary:

Intent on transcending conventional representations of early modern states as bounded territories, Scholz’s current project devises new ways of representing premodern territoriality, using digital tools to create maps that visualize political orders as regimes of movement. Applying spatial analysis to the history of free movement and its restriction, the project provides a historical perspective one of the most controversial issues of our day.

Miranda Spieler is an historian of France and the overseas French empire.  She writes about the legal culture of slave and post-emancipation societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Project Summary:

This project looks to the lives of unfree people from Africa and French colonies to understand the evolving relationship between Paris and the overseas empire at the height of the French slave trade.  While tracing robust ties between Paris, French Atlantic ports, and the monarchy’s East and West Indian colonies, "Slaves in Paris" further explores new concepts of whiteness that arose at the end of the Old Regime. 

Kate van Orden is Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music at Harvard University. Her books include Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (2005); Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print (2014); and Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe (2015). She is also a baroque and classical bassoonist with over 60 recordings on Sony, Virgin Classics, Teldec, Harmonia Mundi, and other labels.

Project Summary: 

"Songs in Unexpected Places" tackles the question of cultural mobility by tracking a vernacular genre—the French chanson—beyond its “native” land. Although these “misplaced” and “strange” songs are fewer in number than the homegrown songs that never traveled, they hold a remarkable power: to expose the extreme displacements of music and musicians, the cross-cultural traffic sustained by singing, and the sounds of metrolingualism in early modern Europe. Ultimately, they can help us undo expectations about where things and people belong in our histories, what it meant to be “native” or “foreign,” and the wholeness of nations and tongues.