Faculty and Their Interests

Faculty Members of the Committee in Charge * * * * * * * * Affiliated Faculty

The committee in Charge is the body responsible for making programmatic and policy decisions for the Program in Modern Thought & Literature, but is not in any way an exclusive list of faculty with whom MTL students work.

MTL students work with faculty across many departments in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and sometimes with faculty in other schools at Stanford as well. To give you an idea of the range of scholars working with our students, we have compiled the following list of faculty who are working with or have worked with our current students as doctoral advisers, qualifying paper evaluators, and/or members of oral exam and dissertation committees.

URSULA KATRINA HEISE,
Director of the Program in MTL, Professor of English
Research interests include Twentieth-century fiction and poetry; theories of modernization, postmodernization and globalization; ecocriticism; literature and science; literature and media; urban studies; science fiction.

LANIER ANDERSON,
Philosophy
Interests include history of late modern philosophy, especially Kant, Nietzsche, neo-Kantianism, 19th century philosophy.

SCOTT BUKATMAN,
Art and Art History
Critical theory and popular media, embodied/perceptual experience in contemporary culture, bodily utopia, and hyperbole in general

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN,
English, Director of the Program in American Studies
Her broad, interdisciplinary research interests have led her to focus on topics including the ways in which American writers' apprenticeships in journalism shaped their poetry and fiction; the influence of African American voices on canonical American literature; the development of feminist criticism; the relationship between public history and literary history; and the challenge of desegregating American literary studies. Although much of her work has centered on Mark Twain, she has also published on writers including Gloria AnzaldÏa, John Dos Passos, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sinclair Lewis, Tillie Olsen, and Walt Whitman.

HANS ULRICH GUMBRECHT,
French & Italian, Spanish & Portuguese, and Comparative Literature
is the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University, where he also organizes the Stanford Presidential Lectures & Symposia in the Humanities and Arts. Among his books on literary theory and literary and cultural history, are Eine Geschichte der spanischen Literatur (1990; English translation forthcoming, Stanford University Press, 2000), Making Sense in Life and Literature (Minnesota University Press, 1992), and In 1926--Living at the Edge of Time (Harvard University Press, 1998). He is currently finishing a book entitled The Non-Hermeneutic. Gumbrecht is a regular contributor to the Humanities section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

SEAN HANRETTA,
History
specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of West Africa. His particular interests are the history of Islam in Africa and of African religions more generally. Past research has focused on Sufism in Francophone West Africa. His current projects focus on Islamic political identity in Accra and on wedding and funeral reform in colonial and postcolonial Gold Coast/Ghana. He also has strong interests in historical theory and methodology, the history of the African diaspora, and comparative histories of slavery.

ANDREA LUNSFORD,
English
Professor Lunsford's research interests include rhetorical theory and practice; gender and writing; collaborative writing, especially among women; the politics of language; feminist pedagogies; and technologies of discourse. She has written or coauthored fourteen books including The Everyday Writer; Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse; Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing; and Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women and the History of Rhetoric, as well as numerous chapters and articles. Her most recent book is Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies. Professor Lunsford has served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and Chair of the Modern Language Association Division on Writing, and as a member of the MLA Executive Council.

SAIKAT MAJUMDAR,
English
Professor Majumdar's research interests include late 19th and 20th century British, Irish and World Anglophone literatures, postcolonial and globalization studies, critical theory.

LIISA MALKKI,
Cultural & Social Anthropology
Professor Malkki works on ontemporary rethinking of the concepts of culture, identity, and the nation; internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms.

HELEN STACY,
Law School
Law professor and barrister. Research interests are international human rights, rule of law, and philosophy of law.

FRED TURNER,
Communication
Professor Turner's research and teaching focus on digital media, journalism and the roles played by media in American cultural history. He is the author of two books, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006) and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (1996; Revised 2nd ed. 2001). His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality crime television to the role of the Burning Man festival in contemporary new media industries.