Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Professor Alexander Key received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in May 2012 and started working at Stanford that same year. Professor Key is a scholar of Classical Arabic literature whose interests range across the intellectual history of the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds from […]

Dr Andrew Hui is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Yale-NUS College. He received his PhD from Princeton University in the Department of Comparative Literature and is a graduate of St John’s College, Annapolis. From 2009-2012, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he taught in the Introduction to Humanities Program. He has […]

Lena Herzog is a visual artist and photographer who lives in Los Angeles. Born in the Ural mountains of Russia, she moved to the city of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) to study Languages and Literature at Leningrad University. She immigrated to the United States in 1990 and worked at Stanford University two years later as […]

Richard Rorty is considered one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. He is credited with reviving the philosophical school of American pragmatism and challenging the accepted pieties of analytic philosophy. He championed “quietism,” which he says attempts “to dissolve, rather than solve” sets of problems that should now be considered obsolete. This November […]

Entitled Opinions is on hiatus

On the 200th birthday of Henry David Thoreau, Robert Harrison and Professor Andrea Nightingale engage in a lively conversation about Walden. This year our nation celebrates the bicentennial of Henry David Thoreau. But few of the commemorations have considered Thoreau as a philosopher, focusing instead on Thoreau as a champion of civil disobedience and the […]

A conversation with William Hurlbut on the ethical implications of CRISPR-Cas9 and human intervention in the genetic makeup of life. William B. Hurlbut, MD, is Adjunct Professor of Neurobiology at the Stanford Medical School. After receiving his undergraduate and medical training at Stanford University, he completed postdoctoral studies in theology and medical ethics, studying with […]

An internationally-known and award-winning lecturer on communication and media, Dr. McLuhan has over 40 years’ teaching experience in subjects ranging from high-speed reading techniques to literature, communication theory, media, culture, and Egyptology. He has taught at many colleges and universities throughout the United States, Canada and abroad. In addition to co-authoring “Laws of Media” in 1988 and […]

Jay Kadis was born in Oakland, California. He has played guitar since high school, initially with Misanthropes, a popular bay area band of the late 1960s, whose highlights included playing the Fillmore Auditorium and opening for Muddy Waters. Jay has written and performed original rock music with several bands, including Urban Renewal and Offbeats. He […]

Dr. Michaela Hulstyn is a lecturer in the Structured Liberal Education program at Stanford University. She earned her PhD from Stanford in 2016 in French, where she taught both language and literature. She has been published in Modern Language Notes and Women in French Studies, among other places. Her research interests center on 20th and […]

Sam Ginn is a second year undergraduate student at Stanford University. He is a computer science major interested in human consciousness and whether human consciousness is artificially replicable. Sam is also a participant in the philosophical reading group at Stanford and he is a devotee of Martin Heidegger's thought. In this show Sam discusses the […]

Who is Donald Trump, and what does he stand for? Do we know? Does he himself know? Or is he caught in that precarious state of disorientation that characterizes our current political predicament? The public discourse is heated, the language inflammatory. Philosopher Hans Sluga of the University of California, Berkeley, brings a cool head […]

Peter Sloterdijk is one of the most controversial thinkers in the world. In many ways, he is the heir of Friedrich Nietzsche, who is sometimes said to have inaugurated the 20th century. On Entitled Opinions, host Robert Harrison opens his discussion with Sloterdijk with the sound of an explosion, and Nietzsche’s words, “I am not […]

“Mary Shelley is a dissenting voice”: Inga Pierson on Frankenstein and the Age of Science January 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, and the occasion has been commemorated with celebrations, conferences, retrospectives, editorials, and more. Clearly, the book belongs to the twenty-first century, as much as it […]

“It has happened. So it can happen again.” Philip Gourevitch on genocide We live in an era of genocides. Author Philip Gourevitch is one of its experts, probing how genocide happens, how the murderers rationalize their participation, and how they live with themselves later. With his new research, he reports the on the survivors, who […]

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 Literature and […]

Monika Greenleaf is a comparative literature scholar who teaches in the Department of Slavic and the Department of Comparative Literature here at Stanford. She is of Polish extraction herself and specializes in Polish and Russian literature. She is the author of Pushkin and Romantic Fashion as well as editor of Russian Subjects: Nation, Empire, and […]

Valerie earned her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 2015. She currently teaches in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford and is working on a book about public memory and the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Alice Kaplan came to Yale in 2009 after many years at Duke University, where she was the founding director of the Duke University Center for French and Francophone Studies and a professor of Romance Studies, Literature, and History. Her first book, Reproductions of Banality (1986), was a theoretical exploration of French fascism. Since then she […]

Monika Greenleaf is a comparative literature scholar who teaches in the Department of Slavic and the Department of Comparative Literature here at Stanford. She is of Polish extraction herself and specializes in Polish and Russian literature. She is the author of Pushkin and Romantic Fashion as well as editor of Russian Subjects: Nation, Empire, and […]

Thomas S. Mullaney is Associate Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China and principal editor of Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority. He received his BA and MA degrees from the Johns Hopkins University, […]

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 is one of the most important film directors of the past half-century. He has directed nearly twenty feature films, including such masterpieces as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. He has also directed dozens of influential documentaries, including many acclaimed recent films such as Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the […]

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 […]

Niklas Damiris is a natural philosopher, trained in biophysics, who has of late taken a turn toward social theory to investigate money’s role in organizing human existence. He is adjunct professor at the University of Lugano in Switzerland, and a visiting scholar at Stanford, where he recently gave a course on the philosophy of money. […]

Marilynne Robinson and the Perception of the Ordinary Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson is considered one of the defining writers of our time, a treasure in contemporary American literature, in both her fiction and her non-fiction. Her novels explore mid-20th century Midwestern life and faith; her essays roam the boundaries between faith and science. She […]

Thomas Ryckman is a professor of philosophy at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Columbia in 1986 and taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern, and UC-Berkeley, before ultimately coming to Stanford. His main area of research is the philosophy of science, specifically the philosophy of physics. He has published […]

Dr. Ruth Starkman has been teaching writing and ethics since 1986. She is the writing specialist for Stanford's Dept of Computer Science and teaches courses like “The Rhetoric of Biomedical Ethics” and “Science, Democracy and Social Media.” In addition to teaching and tutoring students, she writes on ethics, political theory, medicine, science, and higher education. […]

Hans Sluga is the William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy at UC-Berkeley, where he has taught since 1970. In addition to numerous essays, Professor Sluga has published various important books including “Gottlob Frege” (Routledge, 1980, later reprinted and translated into Chinese and Greek), “Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany” (Harvard University Press, […]

Hans Sluga is the William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy at UC-Berkeley, where he has taught since 1970. In addition to numerous essays, Professor Sluga has published various important books including “Gottlob Frege” (Routledge, 1980, later reprinted and translated into Chinese and Greek), “Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany” (Harvard University Press, […]

Edward Feigenbaum is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he was also co-director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory. He received his PhD from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1960, working under the supervision of Herbert Simon and developing EPAM, “Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer.” He is considered one of […]

Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at UC-Berkeley, Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC) and former Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). He is the author of many important books on Michel Foucault and on a variety of topics of anthropological and philosophical interest. A […]

Jessica Merrill holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California-Berkeley. She is currently Mellon Fellow (2013–2015) in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford. Her book project focuses on the intellectual history of modern literary theory and the emergence of the Russian Formalist and Czech Structuralist movements. In addition to literary […]

Monika Greenleaf is a comparative literature scholar who teaches in the Department of Slavic and the Department of Comparative Literature here at Stanford. She is of Polish extraction herself and specializes in Polish and Russian literature. She is the author of Pushkin and Romantic Fashion as well as editor of Russian Subjects: Nation, Empire, and […]

Karol Berger is the Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of Music at Stanford University and is also Affiliated Faculty with the Department of German and the Europe Center at Stanford. He received his PhD at Yale and taught at Boston University before coming to Stanford in 1982. He has […]

Karol Berger is the Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of Music at Stanford University and is also Affiliated Faculty with the Department of German and the Europe Center at Stanford. He received his PhD at Yale and taught at Boston University before coming to Stanford in 1982. He has received fellowships […]

Mark McGurl is a professor in the Department of English at Stanford, where he teaches postwar and contemporary American literature. He has taught at Stanford since 2011, having previously taught at UCLA. He received his BA from Harvard and his PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1998. He has held fellowships from the Office of the […]

David Lummus is currently Assistant Professor of Italian Literature at Stanford University. Prof. Lummus specializes in late medieval and early modern Italian literature and intellectual history. His research and teaching interests include fourteenth-century literature in Latin and the vernacular, Renaissance Humanism, medieval and early modern mythography, and the pastoral tradition. He explores critical approaches such […]

Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), the Australian Catholic University and the University of Nice. He is the author of over 20 books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and […]

Gregory “Grisha” Freidin is professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. He received his PhD from UC-Berkeley in 1979, writing a dissertation on Osip Mandelstam. He has taught at Stanford since then, and has, in that time, distinguished himself as scholar, teacher, and administrator. He has edited and translated many important volumes, including […]

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She received her BA from Vassar College and her MA and PhD from Princeton University. She has taught at East Anglia since 1999. She is the author of widely discussed books including The Many Lives of […]