Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

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, […]

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, teaching at Harvard and then Stanford, primarily French literature and drama. He is interested in […]

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 Memory (New Directions), translated by Sasha Dugdale, has been long-listed for the International Booker […]

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 Center, an ACLS Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.   She is a Harvard Senior Fellow for […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.