By Robert Harrison
The narcotic of intelligent conversation
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Alice Kaplan came to Yale in 2009 after many years at Duke University, where she was the founding director of the Duke University Center for French and Francophone Studies and a professor of Romance Studies, Literature, and History. Her first book,...
Monika Greenleaf is a comparative literature scholar who teaches in the Department of Slavic and the Department of Comparative Literature here at Stanford. She is of Polish extraction herself and specializes in Polish and Russian literature. She is the author of...
Thomas S. Mullaney is Associate Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China and principal editor of Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity...
April 27, 2016--Jean-Marie Apostolidès, professor of French at Stanford, on Guy Debord and the Situationist movement.
Jean-Marie Apostolidès was educated in France, where he received a doctorate in literature and the social sciences. He taught psychology in Canada for seven years and sociology in France for three years. In 1980 he came to the United States,...
Poet Maria Stepanova on Memory and Russia’s “Schizoid Present” “It is something very intimate, the way we communicate with the dead.” The Guardian called 2021 “the year of Stepanova” for good reason. Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s new book, In Memory of...
Prof. Andrea Nightingale has worked primarily on Greek and Roman philosophy and literature. She has also written on the philosophy and literature of ecology (in the modern and postmodern periods). She has been awarded a fellowship at the Stanford Humanities...
April 6, 2016--Aishwary Kumar, professor of history at Stanford, on the thought and career of Mohandas Gandhi.
Aishwary Kumar is assistant professor of history at Stanford and works as an intellectual and political historian of modern South Asia. He works in areas of legal and political thought, political philosophy and democratic culture, religion, caste, and moral psychology, in...
March 23, 2016--A conversation with Werner Herzog, legendary director, about J.A. Baker’s little-known novel ”The Peregrine" and the importance of reading.
Werner Herzog is one of the most important film directors of the past half-century. He has directed nearly twenty feature films, including such masterpieces as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. He has also directed dozens of influential documentaries,...
Hans Ulrich ("Sepp") Gumbrecht is an internationally renowned scholar who is the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. In his scholarship, he focuses on the histories of the national literatures in Romance language (especially French, Spanish, and Brazilian), but...
Dr. Rebecca Pekron recently received her doctorate from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation "Que reste-t-il? [What remains?]" Poetic Approaches to Immortality: Baudelaire and After explores the concept of immortality in the funerary poetry of the nineteenth...
After receiving his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1980, Eric Roberts taught at Wellesley College from 1980-85, where he chaired the Computer Science Department. From 1985-90, he was a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment...
Dr. Marilyn Yalom grew up in Washington D.C. and was educated at Wellesley College, the Sorbonne, Harvard and Johns Hopkins. She has been married to the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom for fifty years and is the mother of four children and...
November 11, 2015--A conversation with physicist-turned-social theorist Niklas Damiris on the history and philosophy of money.
Niklas Damiris is a natural philosopher, trained in biophysics, who has of late taken a turn toward social theory to investigate money’s role in organizing human existence. He is adjunct professor at the University of Lugano in Switzerland, and a...
Marilynne Robinson and the Perception of the Ordinary Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson is considered one of the defining writers of our time, a treasure in contemporary American literature, in both her fiction and her non-fiction. Her novels explore mid-20th...
Thomas Ryckman is a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Columbia in 1986 and taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern, and UC-Berkeley, before ultimately coming to Stanford. His main area of research...
Dr. Ruth Starkman has been teaching writing and ethics since 1986. She is the writing specialist for Stanford's Dept of Computer Science and teaches courses like "The Rhetoric of Biomedical Ethics" and "Science, Democracy and Social Media." In addition to...
Hans Sluga is the William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy at UC-Berkeley, where he has taught since 1970. In addition to numerous essays, Professor Sluga has published various important books including "Gottlob Frege" (Routledge, 1980, later reprinted and translated into Chinese and Greek), "Heidegger's...
Hans Sluga is the William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy at UC-Berkeley, where he has taught since 1970. In addition to numerous essays, Professor Sluga has published various important books including "Gottlob Frege" (Routledge, 1980, later reprinted and translated...
April 8, 2015--Entitled Opinions will be going on hiatus during the spring and summer of 2015 and will be back at some point in the fall.
Edward Feigenbaum is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he was also co-director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory. He received his PhD from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1960, working under the supervision of...
Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at UC-Berkeley, Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC) and former Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). He is the author of many important books...
Jessica Merrill holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California-Berkeley. She is currently Mellon Fellow (2013–2015) in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford. Her book project focuses on the intellectual history of modern literary theory and...
May 21, 2014--A conversation with Monika Greenleaf, Stanford professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, on Dostoevsky and his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov.
May 14, 2014--A conversation with Karol Berger, Stanford professor of Music, on the life and work of German composer Richard Wagner (part two of two).
Karol Berger is the Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of Music at Stanford University and is also Affiliated Faculty with the Department of German and the Europe Center at Stanford. He received his PhD at Yale and...
Mark McGurl is a professor in the Department of English at Stanford, where he teaches postwar and contemporary American literature. He has taught at Stanford since 2011, having previously taught at UCLA. He received his BA from Harvard and his PhD...
David Lummus is currently Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University. Prof. Lummus specializes in late medieval and early modern Italian literature and intellectual history. His research and teaching interests include fourteenth-century literature in Latin and the vernacular, Renaissance Humanism,...
Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), the Australian Catholic University and the University of Nice. He is the...
Gregory "Grisha" Freidin is professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. He received his PhD from UC-Berkeley in 1979, writing a dissertation on Osip Mandelstam. He has taught at Stanford since then, and has, in that time, distinguished...
Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She received her BA from Vassar College and her MA and PhD from Princeton University. She has taught at East Anglia since...
March 27, 2014--A monologue by Robert Harrison on the phenomenon of age and the peculiar question, "How old are we?".
August 9, 2013--Robert Harrison discusses cosmology and inflationary theory with Stanford physicist Andrei Linde.
August 9, 2013--A monologue by Robert Harrison on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and its connections with Dante's Inferno.
Professor Andrei Linde, a native of Moscow, is one of the authors of inflationary cosmology and of the theory of the cosmological phase transitions. His current research involves the theory of dark energy, investigation of the global structure and the...
Karen Feldman is a professor in the Department of German Studies at UC-Berkeley. Her areas of specialization include hermeneutics and phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, German Idealism, literary theory and aesthetics. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago (1989)...
Dr. Pierson received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2009. She has been a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University where her teaching responsibilities cover interdisciplinary introductory seminars such as “Humans and Machines” and...
Michael Leigh Hoyer received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 2012. She specializes in 19th- and 20th century French literature, the history of the novel, and narrative theory. Her dissertation, "Project Fiction, A User's Manual: Readings in a...
Marisa Galvez is Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. She specializes in medieval literature and culture, especially the lyric and romance of Continental Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Her scholarship focuses on such topics as...