Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Professor Marjorie Perloff is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford and Scholar in Residence at USC. She was educated at Barnard College, where she received her B.A. (1953) and at the Catholic University of America where she received her Ph.D. in English (1965). She teaches courses and writes on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics, […]

Giovanni Tempesta has been a lecturer in Italian at Stanford University since 1983 and has taught at all levels of language instruction. He is the author of the Italian grammar book “Questa bellissima lingua italiana, impariamola insieme!” and has just published his Italian translation of “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “Other Verses” by Robert […]

Blakey Vermeule earned her Ph.D. in English Literature at UC Berkeley in 1995, and she has been Professor of English at Stanford University since 2005. Blakey Vermeule's research interests are British literature from 1660-1800, critical theory, cognitive approaches to literature, major British poets, post-Colonial fiction, and the history of the novel. She is the author […]

Laura Wittman received her Ph.D. in 2001 from Yale University where she completed her dissertation in the Department of Italian Language and Literature. The title of her dissertation is “Mystics Without God: Spirituality and Form in Italian and French Modernism,” an analysis of the historical and intellectual context for the self-descriptive use of the term […]

Hayden White is a historian and literary theorist. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught for many years in the History of Consciousness program, and he is currently a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. His many books include Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), […]

Stewart Agras, M.D. (Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Stanford University) was one of the early leaders in the field of behavior therapy. At the University of Vermont, in collaboration with Harold Leitenberg Ph.D., he became interested in phobia as a model for psychotherapy research, leading to the discovery that exposure to the feared situation was a […]

Michael Shanks is the Omar and Althea Dwyer Hoskins Professor of Classical Archaeology at Stanford, and co-director of the Stanford Humanities Lab. He received his Ph.d. from Peterhouse Cambridge in 1992. His research interests include the history of archaeological engagements with the past, and design in Graeco-Roman antiquity. His many books include Theatre/Archaeology (2001, with […]

Aron Rodrigue is professor of History, Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University and the chair of the department of History. He received his PhD from Harvard. His research interests include modern Jewish history; the history and culture of Sephardic Jews; the Jews of modern France; and minority identities. His books include […]

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952. His novels include Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982), The Black Book (1990), My Name is Red (1998), and Snow (2002). Pamuk's most recent book is Istanbul, a collection of the author's early memoirs and an essay about Istanbul. Apart from three years in New York, he […]