Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Who is Donald Trump, and what does he stand for? Do we know? Does he himself know? Or is he caught in that precarious state of disorientation that characterizes our current political predicament?   The public discourse is heated, the language inflammatory. Philosopher Hans Sluga of the University of California, Berkeley, brings a cool head […]

Peter Sloterdijk is one of the most controversial thinkers in the world. In many ways, he is the heir of Friedrich Nietzsche, who is sometimes said to have inaugurated the 20th century. On Entitled Opinions, host Robert Harrison opens his discussion with Sloterdijk with the sound of an explosion, and Nietzsche’s words, “I am not […]

“Mary Shelley is a dissenting voice”: Inga Pierson on Frankenstein and the Age of Science January 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, and the occasion has been commemorated with celebrations, conferences, retrospectives, editorials, and more. Clearly, the book belongs to the twenty-first century, as much as it […]

“It has happened. So it can happen again.” Philip Gourevitch on genocide We live in an era of genocides. Author Philip Gourevitch is one of its experts, probing how genocide happens, how the murderers rationalize their participation, and how they live with themselves later.  With his new research, he reports the on the survivors, who […]

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 century.  Dr. Pekron graduated from Stanford in 2005 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and […]

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 Pushkin and Romantic Fashion as well as editor of Russian Subjects: Nation, Empire, and […]

Valerie earned her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 2015. She currently teaches in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford and is working on a book about public memory and the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment.

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, Reproductions of Banality (1986), was a theoretical exploration of French fascism. Since then she […]

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 Pushkin and Romantic Fashion as well as editor of Russian Subjects: Nation, Empire, and […]

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 of China’s Majority. He received his BA and MA degrees from the Johns Hopkins University, […]