Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

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 addition to global histories of empire, constitutionalism, and citizenship.    A parallel set […]

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 addition to global histories of empire, constitutionalism, and citizenship.  A parallel set of his […]

Werner Herzog, one of the most important film directors of the past half-century, discusses his admiration for the book 'The Peregrine' and the transformative power of reading in this entertaining podcast.

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 also on German literature while, at the same time teaching and writing on the […]

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 […]

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 Corporation’s Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California, where his research focused on programming tools […]

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 the grandmother of five. She has been a professor of French and comparative literature, director […]

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 visiting scholar at Stanford, where he recently gave a course on the philosophy of money. […]

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 century Midwestern life and faith; her essays roam the boundaries between faith and science. She […]

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 is the philosophy of science, specifically the philosophy of physics. He has published […]