Professor Jeffrey Schnapp is the Rosina Pierotti chair and professor of French and Italian and comparative literature. His research falls into two main areas: Italian literature in the age of Dante and the emergence and institutional articulation of Fascist culture in Italy. His other interests are the troubadour lyric; Franco-Italian cultural relations from 1850 to 1950; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel and transportation literature; and Georges Sorel and French anarcho-syndicalism.

Professor Schnapp is the author of several books, including The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante's Paradise (1986) and Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (1996). He is editor of Bernardino Daniello's Commento sopra la Commedia di Dante, as well as The Poetry of Allusion and A Primer of Italian Fascism. His current projects include a cultural history of speed and accident from eighteenth century to the present and a study of mass panoramic photography in Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the second literary historian ever to be granted this honor.

Professor Schnapp is the Director of The Stanford Humanities Laboratory. The SHL offers the opportunity for scholars in the humanities to undertake the sort of mid- to large-scale collaborative research projects that have traditionally been the domain of the natural, formal, and social sciences. The humanities has generally had fewer research funds (thus discouraging resource-intensive scholarship), as well as little incentive to collaborate. These limitations have resulted in research findings -- usually in print form -- that are both produced and consumed by individual scholars working alone.

SHL exists to change that. By giving grants for humanities research with results that take nontraditional forms, SHL attempts to expand both the scope and scale of humanitas and to supplement traditional disciplinary endeavors with an outreach dimension. Whereas institutional pressures on humanities disciplines since World War II have fostered a narrowing of research agendas (sometimes to the point of hyperspecialization) SHL promotes a model of the humanities that is flexible and cross-disciplinary at the core -- Big Humanities, to complement Big Science.

Professor Harrison received his doctorate in Romance Studies from Cornell University in 1984, with a dissertation on Dante's Vita Nuova. In 1985 he accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. In 1986 he joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He was granted tenure in 1992 and was promoted to full professor in 1995. In 1997 Stanford offered him the Rosina Pierotti Chair. In 2002, he was named chair of the Department of French and Italian. In 2014 he was knighted "Chevalier" by the French Republic.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave.

Professor Harrison's first book, The Body of Beatrice, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. It deals with medieval Italian lyric poetry, with special emphasis on Dante's early work La Vita Nuova. The Body of Beatrice was translated into Japanese in 1994. Over the next few years Professor Harrison worked on his next book, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, which appeared in 1992 with University of Chicago Press. This book deals with the ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology. It offers a select history that begins in antiquity and ends in our own time. Forests appeared simultaneously in English, French, Italian, and German. It subsequently appeared in Japanese and Korean as well. In 1994 his book Rome, la Pluie: A Quoi Bon Littérature? appeared in France, Italy, and Germany. This book is written in the form of dialogues between two characters and deals with topics such as art restoration, the vocation of literature, and the place of the dead in contemporary society.

Professor Harrison's next book, The Dominion of the Dead, published in 2003 by University of Chicago Press, examines the relations the living maintain with the dead in diverse secular realms. This book was translated into German, French and Italian. Professor Harrison's book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition appeared in 2008 with the University of Chicago Press, in French with Le Pommier, and in Italian with Fazi Editori , and in German with Hanser Verlag (it subsequently appeared in Chinese translation). His most recent book Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age came out in 2014 with Chicago University Press.  In 2005 Harrison started a literary talk show on KZSU radio called "Entitled Opinions."  The show features hour long conversations with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists.  Robert Harrison is also the Director of Another Look, a Stanford-based book club.

Lazar Fleishman came to Stanford in 1985 after a distinguished career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also been a Visiting Professor at UC-Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, University of Texas at Austin, the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, Charles University in Prague, The University of Vienna and the University of Latvia in his native Riga. His major scholarly interests include 19th and 20th century Russian literature; Boris Pasternak; 20th century Russian emigre and Soviet culture and literary life; Russian avant-garde poetry and art; Russian-Jewish, Russian-Baltic and Russian-Polish cultural relationships; poetics; and archival research.

He is the founder and editor of the series, Stanford Slavic Studies (1987; vol. 50 is forthcoming in 2020). He organized and co-organized a number of high-profile international scholarly events on campus, including the conferences on Aleksandr Pushkin, Andrei Siniavsky, and Boris Pasternak as well as a conference of the historians of Baltic countries and edited or co-edited the collections of papers based on these conferences. His most recent monograph is devoted to the circumstances of the publication of Boris Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago” and the political storm triggered by the 1958 Nobel Prize award in literature to him.

Education

• Ph.D., Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California at Berkeley, June,1979. Dissertation: "Time, Identity and Myth in Osip Mandelstam: 1908-1921"
• M.A., Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California at Berkeley, June 1974
• Special Student, Brandeis University, 1972
• The First State Institute of Foreign Languages, Moscow, USSR, 1969-1971
• Secondary School, Moscow, USSR, 1964

Current courses

• Tolstoy's War and Peace
• Paradigms of Society and Culture in Literature and Film

Previous courses

• The Age of Revolution
• Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and the Social Thought of its Time
• Proseminar in Literary Theory and Study of Russian Literature
• Russia and the Other: A Cultural Approach
• Russian Literature and the Literary Milieu of the NEP Period
• Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Paradigm

Selected publications

• Russia at the End of the Twentieth Century: Culture and Its Horizons in Politics and Society. (Papers delivered at the Stanford University Conference, November 1998). Stanford, 2000. Ed. G. Freidin.
• Russia at the Barricades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Moscow Coup (August 1991), ed. by Victoria Bonnell, Ann Copper and Gregory Freidin. Introduction by Victoria E. Bonnell and Gregory Freidin (M.E. Sharpe, 1994).
• Russian Culture in Transition (Selected Papers of the International Working Group for the Study of Russian Culture, 1990-1991). Compiled, edited, and with an Introduction by Gregory Freidin. Stanford Slavic Studies 7 (1993)
• American Federalists: Hamilton, Madison, Jay. Selections. With an Addendum of The Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution of the United States. Translated into Russian, annotated and with an Introduction by Gregory Freidin. Leon Lipson, Consultant. Edited by V. & L. Chalidze. Benson, Vt.: Chalidze Publications, 1990.
• A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self, Presentation. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1987.
• Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Trans. and ed. by Strobe Talbott and Gregory Freidin (anonymously). With a foreword by Edward Crankshaw and an Intro. by Jerrold Schecter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. (For acknowledgement of Freidin's translation see Strobe Talbott's Introduction to Khrushchev: The Glasnost Tapes [Little, Brown &Co., 1990], p. viii).

Current projects

After a long detour into Russian contemporary culture, politics and society, Gregory Freidin, has returned to his old flame, the Isaac Babel project, a critical biography - as much of Isaac Babel as of the magnetic and elusive voice animating his compact and fragmented oeuvre. He hopes to finish the manuscript, A Jew on Horseback, in a few months. As a follow-up, he is planning, along with Gabriella Safran and Stephen Zipperstein (History and Jewish Studies), an international conference on Babel for the fall of 2003. Together with the Berkeley sociologist, Victoria E. Bonnell, he has begun research on a book-lingth study, tentatively entitled Conjuring up a New Russia: Symbols, Rituals, and Mythologies of national Identit, 1991-2002.

Professional activities

• The Humanities Institute; Modern Languages Association; American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
• Contributing Editor, Znamia, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (Moscow), 1991-6
• Editor, Stanford Slavic Studies, 1987-

Education

Princeton University: Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, 1998. Dissertation: "Narratives of Jewish acculturation in the Russian Empire: Bogrov, Orzeszkowa, Leskov, Chekhov." Adviser: Caryl Emerson

Yale University: B.A., magna cum laude, with honors in Soviet and East European Studies, 1990. Senior Essay: "The descent of the raznochinets literator: Osip Mandelstam's 'Shum vremeni' and evolutionary theory." Adviser: Tomas Venclova

Columbia University/YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, Summer 1999

University of Pennsylvania. Courses in Yiddish language and culture, 1996-1998

Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland. Courses in Polish language, Summers 1993 and 1996

Herzen Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia. Courses in Russian language and culture, Spring 1989

Lycée Privé Gasnier-Guy, Chelles, France. Baccalauréat B (Economics and Social Sciences) with High Honors, June 1986

Previous courses

Beyond Fiddler on the Roof

Anton Chekov and the Turn of the Century

Russia and the Other: A cultural Approach

Selected publications

"Isaac Babel's El'ia Isaakovich as a New Jewish Type," Slavic Review, Vol. 61, No.2 (Summer 2002) (pp. 253-272).

"Nikolai Semenovich Leskov (M. Stebnitsky)." Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 238: Russian Novelists in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, ed. J. Alexander Ogden and Judith E. Kalb. San Francisco: The Gale Group, 2001 (pp. 160-175).

Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000

"Dancing with Death and Salvaging Jewish Culture in Austeria and The Dybbuk," Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Winter 2000) (pp. 761-781).

"Ethnography, Judaism, and the Art of Nikolai Leskov," The Russian Review, Vol. 59 (April 2000) (pp. 235-251).

"Evangel'skii podtekst i evreiskaia drama vo 'Vladychnom sude' N. S. Leskova" [The New Testament subtext and the Jewish drama in N. S. Leskov's "Episcopal Justice"], Evangel'skii tekst v russkoi literture XVIII-XX vekov: Tsitata, reministsensiia, motiv, siuzhet, zhanr (The Gospels in eighteen- to twentieth-century Russian literature: citation, evocation, motif, subject, genre) (Vol. 2). Petrozavodsk, Russia: Izdatel'stvo petrozavodskogo universiteta, 1999 (pp. 462-470).

"Love Songs Between the Sacred and the Vernacular: Pushkin's 'Podrazhaniia' in the Context of Bible Translation." Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 1995) (pp. 165-183).

Current projects

Gabriella Safran is the author of Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire, which received both the National Jewish Book Award (East European Studies Division) and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literstures in 2001. In the spring of 2001, she and History Professor Steven Zipperstein co-organized a conference on the Russian and Yiddish writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary S. Ansky; currently they are editing a collection of articles on the same topic. During the 2002-2003 academic year, Safran will be participating in a research seminar at the Center for Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, where she will be completing a literary biography of Ansky.

Professional activities

Organized "Between Two Worlds: S. An-sky at the Turn of the Century, An International Conference." Stanford University, March 17-19, 2001.

Ludger Kuehnhardt was born in Muenster (Germany) in 1958. He is Director of the Center for European Integration Studies (ZEI), a think-tank of the University of Bonn which he helped to set up since 1997(www.zei.de). Prior to this, he was Chair of Political Science at the University of Freiburg and worked as Speechwriter for the former German President Richard von Weizsaecker. Ludger Kuehnhardt has been a Visiting Fellow ot Stanford's Hoover Institution in 1995/96. He was a Public-Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington D.C. in 2002 and a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College in 2000. He is a Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Milan and at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna.

Prof. Kuehnhardts research interests center on transatlantic relations and European foreign and security policy in light of the joint new challenges in the Greater Middle East. He is also conducting research on the constitution-building process of the European Union and its ramification for European identity. His research interests include the "globalization" of regional integration processes and its link to the European integration experience.

He has wide range experiences in political and academic consulting work and has lectured in all continents. He studied history, philosophy and political science in Bonn, Geneva, Tokyo and at Harvard's Center for European Studies.

Ludger Kuehnhardt is the author of more than twenty books on Europe, transatlantic relations,political theory and history of ideas.