Amir Weiner's research concerns Soviet history with an emphasis on the interaction between totalitarian politics, ideology, nationality, and society. He is the author of Making Sense of War, Landscaping the Human Garden and numerous articles and edited volumes on the impact of World War II on the Soviet polity, the social history of WWII and Soviet frontier politics. His forthcoming book, The KGB: Ruthless Sword, Imperfect Shield, will be published by Yale University Press in 2021. He is currently working on a collective autobiography of KGB officers titled Coffee with the KGB: Conversations with Soviet Security Officers. Professor Weiner has taught courses on modern Russian history; the Second World War; Totalitarianism; War and Society in Modern Europe; Modern Ukrainian History; and History and Memory.

I became interested in Russia at the height of the Cold War and initially studied Russia and Russian with an eye to the foreign service. History lured me way, especially after spending a junior semester at Leningrad State University in 1970 and having the chance to travel around the Soviet Union a bit. In graduate research and since coming to Stanford in 1982, I have focused on the early modern period (from the fourteenth century through the eighteenth). In almost all my work I have been explored the question of how politics worked in an autocracy. Theoretically I am interested in how early modern states, particularly empires, tried to create, at best, social cohesion and, at least, stability, by ritual, ideology, law and the measured use of violence. My early research focused on structures of power at the Kremlin court and the influence of kinship and marriage in politics and on social values from Muscovy to the Enlightenment (Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System 1987); these themes encouraged my abiding interest in the roles of women in political ideology and practice. I have written two books on legal culture, one on disputes over honor (By Honor Bound 1999) and one on the practice of the criminal law (Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia 2012). Here I’ve contrasted the letter of the law with the workings of local courts, how people used the law, how judges and other officials played roles in the system, how the law was written and interpreted. In all this I’ve tried to place Russia in a comparative context where appropriate, trying to break down clichés of Russia being fundamentally different from European history or unknowable.

My current work goes in several directions. One is a turn to the visual -- I have written several articles on the production and use in Russia of icons, frescos and miniatures as a medium for political communication. I am now finishing up a project on images of Russia produced by foreign engravers in early print publications and maps. The tension in these images between stock tropes of the engraver's trade and eye-witness information, is one fascinating aspect; another is the challenge to assess the impact of text and image on the reader. All in all, I have found that most illustrated works about Russia present a more nuanced understanding than the image of “despotism” that has caught a lot of scholarly attention. Finally, I am interested in how Russia functioned as an empire. I recently published a synthetic history (The Russian Empire 1450-1801 2017) of Russia as a “Eurasian politics of different empire,” and I plan to follow up this theme and return to the practice of the law by studying the implementation of Catherine II’s judicial reforms (1775) in the non-Russian provinces.

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.