Cécile Alduy works on notions of "nationhood", "identity," on cultural and political constructions and mythologies of "Frenchness" at critical junctures of France's cultural history. Areas of interests include the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance, far right ideology and rhetoric (National Front/Rassemblement national), the relations between cultural, literary and medical discourses on gender and the body in early modern Europe, poetry and poetics, narrative forms and their discontent, French cinema and contemporary French literature, and gender studies. 

Her last book, La Langue de Zemmour was published by Seuil in February 2022 (it was featured in the tv night show Quotidien and L’instant M on France Inter radio among others). 

Her previous book, Ce qu'ils disent vraiment. Les présidentiables pris aux mots (Seuil, 2017), combines digital humanities tools on wide corpora of political discourse with stylistic and rhetorical analysis, narratology, barthesian mythemes, the history of ideas to parse the discursive output and communication strategies of the major presidential candidates of the 2017 election. 

Her book Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Seuil, 2015) was the first to propose a comprehensive, corpus-based comparative analysis of the discourse, lexicon, mythemes, and ideological tenets of far right leaders Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen. 

Cécile Alduy contributes regularly to French, British and American media: she has written a profile of Marine Le Pen for The Atlantic, as well as many investigative, analytical and opinion pieces in Le Monde, Foreign Affairs, Politico, The Nation, The Boston Review, L'Obs, Sciences Humaines, ZAdig, le 1, Le Nouveau Magazine Litéraire, AOC, etc.

She has co-edited with Dominic Thomas and Bruno Cornellier a special issue of the journal "Occasions" on “The Charlie Hebdo Attacks and their Aftermath” that gathers over a dozen essays from French, Canadian, American and English intellectuals from all horizons. 

Her previous book, The Politics of Love: Poetics and Genesis of the "Amours" in Renaissance France (1549-1560) (Geneva: Droz, 2007), examines how the poetics of French Petrarchan love collections was exploited by the generation of Ronsard and Du Bellay to promote a nationalist agenda, that of a "Defense and Illustration of the French Tongue" and its cultural supremacy. 

In Renaissance studies, she has published extensively on the works of Marot, Scève, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Louise Labé, La Boétie, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Philippe Jaccottet among others. Her publications also include a revised critical edition of Maurice Scève's Délie (Paris: STFM, 2001) and a comprehensive study of all works written by or on Scève from his lifetime to the present (Maurice Scève. Roma: Memini, 2006). She has served as guest editor of two collected volumes: a special issue of Réforme Humanisme Renaissance entitled "Licences et censures poétiques. La littérature érotique et pornographique vernaculaire à la Renaissance" (vol. 69, 2009); and the proceedings of the 2008 interdisciplinary conference Between Experience and Experiment In The Early Modern World, co-edited with Roland Greene and published in Republic of Letters (2010). 

Prof. Alduy was the Chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages from 2020 to 2023. Previously, she has served as Director of the French and Italian Department (2015-2019), and Director of the Center of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) from 2010 to 2013. 

She is an affiliated scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute as well as a "chercheur associée" at the CEVIPOF, Sciences Po. 

In 2007, Cécile Alduy was awarded the "Médaille de l'ordre des Lettres et des Arts."

Dan Edelstein works primarily on eighteenth-century France, which also serves as a convenient launching pad for raids into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the early modern period. His first book, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), examines how liberal natural right theories, classical republicanism, and the myth of the golden age became fused in eighteenth-century political culture, only to emerge as a violent ideology during the Terror. This book won the 2009 Oscar Kenshur Book Prize. He recently published a second book entitled The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), which explores how the idea of an Enlightenment emerged in French academic circles around the 1720's. He is currently working on two book projects: first, on the concept of "counter-mythologies" during the Enlightenment and in the aftermath of the French Revolution; and second, on the "myth of the Revolution."

With J.P. Daughton, Edelstein co-directs theFrench Culture Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, and with Paula Findlen, is a principal investigator for a project called "Mapping the Republic of Letters," which received a three-year Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities grant, and a "Digging into Data" grant from the NEH (read more about the project).He is a founding editor of Republics of Letters, where he also contributes to the Editors' blog.

Edelstein's research was featured in The Europe Center January 2018 Newsletter.

John Bender is Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Affiliated Faculty of the The Europe Center. His research and teaching focus on the 18th century in England and France. His special concerns include the relationship of literature to visual arts, to philosophy and science, as well as to the sociology of literature and critical theory. 

Bender is the author of Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (1972), Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in 18th-Century England (1987), which received the Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for 18th-Century Studies, The Culture of Diagram (2010)--as co-author with Michael Marrinan—and Ends of Enlightenment (2012).

Stephen Hinton is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, Professor of Music and, by courtesy, of German. From 2011-15 he served as the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. From 2006–2010 he was Senior Associate Dean for Humanities & Arts, and from 1997–2004 chairman of the Department of Music. Before moving to Stanford, he taught at Yale University and, before that, at the Technische Universität Berlin. His publications include The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik; Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera for the series Cambridge Opera Handbooks; the critical edition of Die Dreigroschenoper for the Kurt Weill Edition (edited with Edward Harsh); Kurt Weill, Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings, edited with Jürgen Schebera, and issued in 2000 in an expanded second edition); and the edition of the Symphony Mathis der Maler for Paul Hindemith’s Collected Works.

He has published widely on many aspects of modern German music history and theory, with contributions to publications such as Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and Funkkolleg Musikgeschichte. He has also served as editor of the journal Beethoven Forum. Recent articles include “The Emancipation of Dissonance: Schoenberg’s Two Practices of Composition” (Music & Letters, 2010) and “Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre: Psychology and Comprehensibility” (Tonality 1900-1950: Concept and Practice). His book Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, the first musicological study of Kurt Weill’s complete stage works, won the 2013 Kurt Weill Prize for distinguished scholarship in musical theater. Together with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, he produced the series of online courses called Defining the String Quartet focusing on the music of Haydn (2016) and Beethoven (2019).

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Emeritus (since 2018) , in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian. During the past two decades, he has received twelve honorary doctorates from universities in seven different countries. While Gumbrecht continues to be a Catedratico Visitante Permanente at the University of Lisbon and became a Presidential Professor at the Hebrew University (Jerusalem) in 2020, he continues to work on two long-term book projects at Stanford: "Phenomenology of the Human Voice" and "Provinces -- a Historical Approach."

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.

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-