School of Humanities and Sciences
Humanities at home
From their kitchen tables and their living rooms, faculty in the School of Humanities and Sciences translate poems, compose music, share childhood memories, read meaningful texts, examine visual artworks, and more.
What has been on the minds of Stanford professors as they navigate this turbulent and anxious time? Where do they find comfort and solace, challenge and struggle, beauty and grace? While many aspects of campus life are now mediated through a computer screen, the extended time apart has offered us a rare chance to hear from faculty informally,…
Read MoreLeonardo da Vinci is celebrated at Stanford’s Green Library
Students, faculty and staff collaborate on an exhibition and a grand opening that Leonardo would have appreciated.
Chocolate Heads Movement Band, a genre-defying student performing arts group put on an unconventional and unexpected performance in the rotunda of Green Library’s Bing Wing for the opening reception of the exhibition Leonardo’s Library: The World of a Renaissance Reader, on view through Oct. 13, 2019. Under the direction of Aleta Hayes, a lecturer in…
Read MoreThe first two VAF artists are Turkish ud player and composer Necati Çelik and Indian photographer Gauri Gill
New Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF) brings international artists into Stanford classrooms across campus.
The Office of the Vice President for the Arts at Stanford University announces the first two artists in the new Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF). The program brings international artists into Stanford classrooms in order to provide a stimulus in artistic thinking and aesthetic perspectives to disciplines across the university.…
Read More Stanford’s spring quarter guest artists
Guest artists are all over campus this spring. Indie rock band Glass Animals play Stanford Stadium; the open-air literary celebration Stories of Exile, Reckoning and Hope takes place on the main stage in White Plaza; Mina Morita directs Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan in Roble Studio Theater; and Stanford Live’s popular Cabaret series continues in Bing’s cozy…
Read More Michele Elam is a 2018 AALCS award recipient
The African American Literature and Culture Society is proud to announce the recipients of the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, and the Darwin T. Turner Award for Excellence in Scholarship in African American Culture and Literature for the year 2018. Michele Elam, our Turner Award recipient, is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies, Olivier…
Read More Fall quarter guest artists
See who is on campus this fall.
One of the ways that Stanford is creating opportunities for meaningful engagement with the arts for students and the university community is by inviting over 100 artists each year to campus to create, perform and discuss their work. This fall quarter the roster of guest artists includes comedian and political commentator Samantha Bee in conversation…
Read MoreStanford team brings medieval texts to a contemporary audience
A new website curated by Stanford faculty and students, the Global Medieval Sourcebook, translates medieval literature into English for the first time.
The Middle Ages produced a staggering wealth of literary works, spanning dozens of languages and nearly 1,000 years. The question today is how to bring these texts to a modern audience who may not have specialized knowledge of medieval languages and contexts. The illustration depicts King Henry II of England demanding that the Arthurian romances…
Read MoreStanford literary scholars reflect on Jane Austen’s legacy
English Professor Alex Woloch and two doctoral students discuss author Jane Austen’s writing style and why her novels still dominate literary and popular culture 200 years after her death.
Two centuries after Jane Austen’s death, the early 19th-century English author’s words persist in our culture. This drawing of Jane Austen was made by her sister, Cassandra, around 1810. (Image credit: National Portrait Gallery, London) Austen, who died on July 18, 1817, at 41, is known for her six completed novels, among them the highly adapted Pride…
Read More Alexander Nemerov to deliver Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts
For six weeks this spring, ALEXANDER NEMEROV will be spending Sundays at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he will give the 66th annual A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. The topic of his lectures, The Forest: America in the 1830s, is the first ever in the history of the…
Read More “The Tempest” behind the scenes
Stanford Theater & Performance Studies presents William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a vibrant, out-of-this-world tale of romance, revenge and forgiveness. As Shakespeare’s works go, few are more magical than The Tempest, a fantastical and deeply human play about an exiled sorcerer, his budding daughter, a civilization abandoned and a world reborn. This production is presented in…
Read More Stanford alum’s debut novel gets National Book Critics recognition
The reaction on YAA GYASI‘s Facebook page to the news that her debut novel Homegoing was the 2016 recipient of the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Prize was swift: 379 likes; 22 comments; and 19 shares. And that was before dawn. The John Leonard Prize was established to recognize outstanding first books in any…
Read More Medieval songs reflect humor in amorous courtships, Stanford scholar finds
Through a new translation of medieval songs, Stanford German studies Professor Kathryn Starkey reveals an unconventional take on romance.
Medieval courtship brings to mind images of chivalrous knights worshipping fair damsels, expressing their love for their ladies in refined and poetic language. But courtship did not play out this way for all medieval knights. Neidhart von Reuental (1190-1237), a medieval German poet, composed songs about a fictional knight whose amorous pursuits were often obstructed…
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