Campus Stories - Posts
Film director Werner Herzog visits Stanford to talk about literary classic on peregrine falcons
J.A. Baker wrote The Peregrine at a precarious moment in environmental history: By the 1960s, the falcons had almost vanished entirely from the English countryside, thanks to aggressive use of pesticides. Baker’s response, an ecstatic panegyric to peregrines, stunned critics with its originality, power and beauty. The little-known 1967 masterpiece will be the subject of…
Stanford New Ensemble presents new classical music in new ways to new audiences
Joo-Mee Lee’s vision for the Stanford New Ensemble is as expansive as the “new classical music” genre. Lee, who teaches introductory violin and a course on professional development in music in the Department of Music, said she is taking the Stanford New Ensemble out of the music hall for concerts in untraditional venues around campus….
Happy 2016!
With the opening of the McMurtry Building, the new home for the Department of Art & Art History, we reached a milestone in the university’s ongoing commitment to building programs, curricula, and resources in the arts. The new building provides an architecturally exciting and inspiring home for the department, allowing it to expand its programmatic…
Adam Johnson wins National Book Award
Adam Johnson, a professor of English at Stanford and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has received the 2015 National Book Award for fiction for his short story collection, “Fortune Smiles.” Winners of the award, which recognizes the best American literature, were announced on Wednesday at the 66th National Book Awards Benefit in New York City. The award,…
Stanford performances and symposium highlight architecture
It has been weeks since the last hard-hat spotting in the arts district, but buildings remain in the spotlight at the corner of Roth Way and Lomita Drive. This weekend, architecture will be considered and celebrated through the medium of performance. Building Scene: Space Launch, performed by the Chocolate Heads Movement Band, is a dance…
Artistic works influence our minds and nervous systems, Stanford scholar reveals
No two disciplines could seem further apart than theater and science, but, as it turns out, they’re intimate bedfellows. As Stanford professor Matthew W. Smith has discovered, modern theater – and, by extension, film and television – basically owe their life to the scientific study of the nervous system. An associate professor of German studies…
Cantor Arts Center digitizes collection for online database
Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center has completed a 6-year project to make its collection accessible online. Students, faculty, scholars and the general public can now visit the museum’s website, type in a title, artist, theme or other search criteria, and see high-quality digital images of the majority of the 45,000-plus objects in the collection. Partial inventories…
Filmmaker Mira Nair shares the art of portraying the complexities of South Asia
“Nothing prepared me for the extraordinary hospitality, but also the ancient and deeply modern culture that I was in front of,” MIRA NAIR recalled thinking during her first trip to Lahore, Pakistan. “And that is what led me to make a film about Pakistan.” Nair, a renowned Indian filmmaker, was speaking at a film screening…
Stanford photography instructor’s work in national spotlight
ROBERT DAWSON, instructor of photography in the Department of Art & Art History, spent 21 years photographing public libraries across the United States. Now, his photos will get a national spotlight. The Library of Congress recently announced the acquisition of Dawson’s entire archive from the project “Public Library: An American Commons.” The archive, acquired through…
In the Conservation Lab of Stanford University Libraries, every story has a happy ending
Each story begins with the arrival of a university treasure – a rare book, map, serial or manuscript that needs repair, or a one-of-a-kind object that needs a custom-made box. Like all artisans, Stanford’s conservators have a deep appreciation and respect for precious objects rare to modern, from a first edition On the Origin of…
New Stanford exhibition highlights power of reinterpretation, consultation with Native American communities
In the late 1890s, the entrepreneur and former lieutenant governor of California, John R. Daggett, assembled an ethnographic collection of objects to illustrate the lives of Hupa, Karuk and Yurok communities in Northern California. Earlier he had served as commissioner for California’s pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where exhibits showcased material…
Anna Deavere Smith talks about the healing power of stories
On Oct. 28, hundreds gathered at Memorial Auditorium for a night of storytelling and conversation with former Stanford faculty member Anna Deavere Smith, an award-winning pioneer in the field of documentary theater. Smith is best known for her one-woman, multi-character performances, which depict people reflecting on moments of intense catastrophe. Her plays range in dramatic…
Stanford scholars spy history of capitalist culture in Bond film songs
In the lead-up to Spectre, the latest film in the decades-long James Bond spy thriller franchise opening this week, much of the recent buzz has centered on another long-running 007 tradition – the title song. Amidst all the speculation about who would sing the new Bond song, Stanford scholars Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold wrote…
Sounds of the sea
Every fall Chris Chafe, professor of music and director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), takes students from Music 220A out on the high seas to record sound. In October 2015, 30 students chewed a bit of ginger and headed out for the day to dangle their self-built hydrophones over…
“Comma And…”
Last winter quarter, Stanford undergraduate students in any discipline or major were invited to submit new work for the Department of Art & Art History’s second annual undergraduate juried art exhibition titled Comma And… . After much discussion and deliberation, a jury whittled down the selections and made their final recommendations of 27 works from 20 students….
