How I Write Writers

The following writers have appeared in the How I Write series.

David Abernethy, Emeritus Professor of Political Science
Author of The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980 (2000) and The Political Dilemma of Popular Education: An African Case (1964).

Donald Barr, Professor of Sociology and Human Biology
Author of Introduction to U.S. Health Policy: The Organization, Financing, and Delivery of Health Care in America

Eavan Boland, Professor of English
Author of nine volumes of poetry, including Against Love Poetry, The Lost Land, In a Time of Violence, and An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-87. She has also published a volume of prose called Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time.

David Brady, Professor of Political Science, Chair of the Public Policy Program, and Associate Director of the Hoover Institution
Author of Revolving Gridlock (with Craig Volden) and Public Policy in the 1980's (with J. Anderson and C. Bullock) as well as many articles.

John Bravman, Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
Author of numerous technical papers, often in collaboration with other scientists and engineers. Transcript.

Paulla Ebron, Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology
Author of Performing Africa. A second project focuses on tropicality and regionalism as it ties West Africa and the U.S. Georgia Sea Islands in a dialog about landscape, memory and political uplift. This project is entitled "Making Tropical Africa in the Georgia Sea Islands."

Penelope Eckert, Professor of Linguistics, Cultural and Social Anthropology, and Director of Feminist Studies
Author of Gender and Language Practice (with Sally McConnell-Ginet), Linguistic Variation as Social Practice, and Jocks and Burnouts: Social Identity in the High School, as well as numerous articles, such as "Vowels and Nail Polish: The Emergence of Linguistic Style in the Preadolescent Heterosexual Marketplace."

Harry Elam, Professor of Drama
Author of Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka and The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson. Co-editor of African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader; Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Black Performance and Popular Culture.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Professor of English and Director of American Studies
Author of Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices, and From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America.

George Fredrickson, Professor Emeritus of U.S. History
Author of Racism: A Short History, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Rationalism, and Social Movements, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa, and The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny. Transcript.

Graduate Students on Writing a Dissertation
A roundtable discussion with four graduate students who are currently writing or have just finished their dissertation.

Estelle Freedman, Professor of History
Author of No Turning Back: The History and the Future of Women, Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, and Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930.

Bill Guttentag, Lecturer at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a documentary and feature film writer-producer-director
He has received two Oscars, three additional Oscar nominations, a Peabody Award, three Emmy Awards, two additional Emmy nominations, two Writers Guild Award nominations, a Producers Guild Award nomination, and a Robert Kennedy Journalism Award. His films have been selected for the Sundance Film Festival three times and have played and won awards at numerous American and international film festivals. His first novel, Boulevard, was published in 2010 and the paperback version was released in 2011.

John Hennessy, President of Stanford University
Author or co-author of over one hundred scientific papers, as well as the co-author of two textbooks, Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach.

David Henry Hwang, Playwright (video via Stanford on iTunes)
One of America's most prominent playwrights, he is the author of many plays, including the Tony-Award-winning M. Butterfly and FOB and Yellow Face, both of which won Obie Awards. He is also a screenwriter and  librettist.

Terry Karl, Professor of Political Science
Author of Bottom of the Barrel: Africa's Oil Boom and the Poor and articles such as "Economic Inequality and Democratic Instability," "Reflections on the Paradox of Plenty," "The Hybrid Regimes of Latin America," and "Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America."

Thomas Kealey, Jones Lecturer in Fiction
Author of the The Creative Writing MFA Handbook. His work has appeared in Best American Non-Required Reading, Glimmer Train, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His novel in progress is entitled The Winged Girl.

David Kennedy, Donald J. McLachian Professor of History
Author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. His other books include Over Here: The First World War and American Society, The American People in the Depression, and Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, in addition to many articles. He is also a co-author of a highly influential textbook The American Pageant: A History of the Republic, now in its 13th edition.

Donald Kennedy, Bing Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, Emeritus, and President Emeritus of Stanford University
Editor of Science, a leading scientific journal and author of Valuing Nature (with Lawrence H Goulder), U.S. Policy and the Global Environment (with John A. Riggs), and Academic Duty.

Andrea Lunsford, Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric
Author of The St. Martin's Handbook, Everything's an Argument, The Everyday Writer, Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, The Presence of Others, and Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing.

Hazel Markus, Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences
Co-author of the forthcoming Well-being, American Style, along with Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies, Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence, and Social Stigma: The Psychology of Marked Relationships.

Scotty McLennan, Dean of Religious Life
Author of Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up with Has Lost Its Meaning and, with Laura Nash, Church on Sunday, Work on Monday: A Guide to Reflection.

Thomas McNeely, Jones Lecturer in Fiction
Author of stories published in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and other journals. His story, "Sheep," has been included in Best of the South: The Best of the Second Decade. He is currently working on a novel.

Diane Middlebrook, Emerita Professor of English
Author of Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton, The Poetry of Anne Sexton, and, forthcoming, a book on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and a biography of Ovid.

Abbas Milani, Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford, Research Fellow and Co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution, and Visiting Professor in the Stanford Department of Political Science.
Author of more than twenty books, most recently the biography The Shah, and a memoir, Tales of Two Cities.

Paula Moya, Associate Professor of English
Author of Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism with Michael Hames-Garcia.

Anne Firth Murray, Consulting Professor in Human Biology
Author of Paradigm Found: Turning your Dreams into Positive Action, which will appear 2006. She is currently working on a new book on international women’s health and human rights.

Sianne Ngai, Professor of English
Author of cultural critiques such as Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust, Stuplimity: Shock and Boredom in Twentieth-Century Aesthetics, and Jealous Schoolgirls, Single White Females, and Other Bad Examples: Rethinking Gender and Envy. Prof. Ngai's experimental poetry books include Criteria, My Novel, and Discredit. Her current book projects include Ugly Feelings: Literature, Affect, and Ideology.

Nancy Packer, Professor Emerita of English (audio via Stanford on iTunes)
Author of six books, including Small Moments, which received the Commonwealth Club of California Award for fiction, and In My Father’s House a nonfiction work in stories about Packer’s growing up among boisterous siblings and a strong-willed father who was a member of Congress. Her stories have been widely anthologized and she has also co-authored two textbooks.

Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emerita of English
Author of The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage , The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, and Wittgenstein’s Ladder.

PWR Faculty Roundtable
Christine Alfano, Kevin DiPirro, Alyssa O’Brien, Susan Wyle, Lecturers in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, talk about writing from the perspective of writers who teach writing.

David Rasch, University Ombudsperson and Director of the Stanford Help Center
Author of a chapter on assisting university faculty and staff through organizational changes in the book Process and Organizational Redesign. He is currently writing a book designed to help writers who are struggling with blocks, anxiety, procrastination, and related difficulties.

John Rickford, Professor of Linguistics
Author of Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English, Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (with Penelope Eckert), African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution and Educational Implications, Dimensions of a Creole Continuum, Sociolinguistics and Pidgin-Creole Studies (Editor), and A Festival of Guyanese Words (Editor).

Paul Robinson, Professor of History and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
Author of Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters, Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette, Freud and His Critics, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss, The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson, and The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, and Herbert Marcuse.

Eric S. Roberts, Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Engineering and Senior Associate Dean
Author of Programming Abstracts in C, The Art and Science of C, and Thinking Recursively.

Mary Lou Roberts, Professor of History
Author of Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin de Siecle France, and Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Post-War France, 1918-1928.

Richard Rorty, Professor of Comparative Literature
Author of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers I, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America, Truth and Progress: Philosphical Papers III, and Philosphy and Social Hope.

Renato Rosaldo, Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology
Author of Ilongot Headhunting: 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History, and Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Editor of Creativity/Anthropology (with Smadar Lavie and Kirin Narayan), Anthropology of Globlization (with Jon Inda), and Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia: National and Beloning in the Hinterlands, among other books.

Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences
Author of A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: Stress Disease and Coping, and The Trouble with Testosterone.

Ramon Saldivar

Debra Satz, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Ethics in Society Program
Co-author with John Ferejohn of Rational Choice and Social Theory. Articles and chapters include “The Limits of the Market: A Map of the Major Debates,” “Equality of What Among Whom?: Thoughts on Cosmopolitanism, Statism and Nationalism,” and “Markets in Women’s Sexual Labor.”

Peter Stansky, Professor Emeritus of History (audio via Stanford on iTunes)
Author of many books, and has produced studies of some of the seminal figures in British political and cultural history from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th: Gladstone, William Morris, George Orwell, Henry Moore, and Benjamin Britten. His most recent book, The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940, was published in 2008.

Claude Steele, Professor of Psychology and Past-Chair of the Psychology Department
Author of journal articles and chapters such as “How Self-Esteem Influences the Assessment of Our Abilities,” “Young Gifted and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African-American Students,” and “The Role of Standardized Testing in Race-Sensitive Admissions.”

Melena Watrous, Jones Lecturer in Fiction
Author of stories published in Triquarterly, The Massachussetts Review, and the Alaska Quarterly Review, and has received prizes from Glimmertrain and the Faulkner Society. She is currently working on a novel, and reviews fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Alex Woloch, Professor of English
Author of The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, and co-editor of Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture.

Steven Zipperstein, Professor of History and Co-Director of Jewish Studies
Author of Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha-am and the Origins of Zionism, and The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881