Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

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 […]

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 […]