Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, where he has worked since leaving MCI in 2005. At Google, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced Internet-based products and services from Google. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet […]

Joshua Landy is Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. He has written Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and has edited, with Thomas Pavel and Claude Bremond, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1994). This is his first appearance as host of Entitled Opinions. He was a guest of the show […]

Abraham Verghese, MD and MACP, is Professor in Stanford's Department of Medicine, and Senior Associate Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine. He previously served for five years as Director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas. He is the author of two bestselling books: My Own Country: […]

Heather Webb specializes in the literature and cultural history of medieval and Renaissance Italy. Areas of research include Dante, early Italian lyric poetry, devotional poetry and prose and history of the body. Her book manuscript, entitled The Medieval Heart: Circulation before William Harvey, is currently under review. She has published essays on Giovanni da San […]

Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1945, and educated at the universities of Cambridge (B.A. and M.A. in English Literature) and Manchester (PhD. in Medieval Persian Literature). He lived in Iran for 8 years (1970-1978), and also for some time in both Italy and Greece. He is currently Professor of Persian and Chair […]

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature, of French & Italian, of Spanish & Portuguese (by courtesy), and is affiliated with German Studies, and the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. He is also Professeur Associé au Département de Littérature comparée at the Université […]

Nicholas Jenkins, a writer on culture and literature, discusses W.H. Auden's views on poetry and history, the connection between Auden's voice and class identity, the symbolic island of Englishness in his poetry, his political ideologies and their influence on his work, his famous poem and its meaning, his conversion to Christianity and the power of poetry, and his decision to omit a poem from his collected works.

Paul Robinson works on the history of European (and sometimes American) thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. His writing has focused on three topics. The first is the history of psychoanalysis. The second is the history of ideas about human sexuality, especially the experience of gays and lesbians. The third is the connection between […]

Lanier Anderson was educated at Yale (A.B., 1987) and the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., Ph.D., 1993). He works in the history of late modern philosophy, focusing primarily on Kant and his influence on 19th c. philosophy. He is the author of articles on Kant's theoretical philosophy, on Nietzsche, and on the neo-Kantian movement. He is […]