Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

Robert Harrison and Truman Chen on Randolph Bourne

Robert Harrison on Lightness and Heaviness in Art

Edward Feigenbaum on Artificial Intelligence

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 on Foucault and “the contemporary”

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 on Russian Futurism

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 on Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov

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 on Richard Wagner- Part 2

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 on Richard Wagner- Part 1

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 on Fiction-Writing Programs

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 on Mythology

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 on anatheism

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 […]

Grisha Freidin on Leo Tolstoy

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 on The Great Gatsby

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 […]

“How Old are We?” — A Monologue

Dante and J. Alfred Prufrock

A Monologue on Dante & Prufrock

Andrei Linde on the Universe

Professor Andrei Linde, a native of Moscow, is one of the authors of inflationary cosmology and of the theory of the cosmological phase transitions. His current research involves the theory of dark energy, investigation of the global structure and the fate of the universe, and quantum cosmology. He is the author of more than 200 […]

Karen Feldman on Walter Benjamin

Karen Feldman is a professor in the Department of German Studies at UC-Berkeley. Her areas of specialization include hermeneutics and phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, German Idealism, literary theory and aesthetics. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago (1989) and her Ph.D. from DePaul University (1998). Her current research concerns aesthetics and historiography from […]

Inga Pierson on Simone Weil

Dr. Pierson received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from New York University in 2009. She has been a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University where her teaching responsibilities cover interdisciplinary introductory seminars such as “Humans and Machines” and “Epic Journeys, Modern Quests,” and is currently a Lecturer in the Thinking Matters program (formerly […]

Michael Hoyer on David Foster Wallace

Michael Leigh Hoyer received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 2012. She specializes in 19th- and 20th century French literature, the history of the novel, and narrative theory. Her dissertation, “Project Fiction, A User's Manual: Readings in a Subgenre,” offers a new historically-informed philosophical aesthetics for analyzing novels that exhibit a projective […]

Marisa Galvez on Troubadour Poetry

Marisa Galvez is Associate Professor of French at Stanford University. She specializes in medieval literature and culture, especially the lyric and romance of Continental Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Her scholarship focuses on such topics as crusade, performance, and the European lyric tradition from the Middle Ages to the present day. In addition […]

A Monologue on The Doors (Dedicated to Ray Manzarek)

Ray Manzarek (born Raymond Daniel Manczarek, Jr.; February 12, 1939– May 20, 2013) was an American musician, singer, producer, film director, and author, best known as a founding member and keyboardist of The Doors from 1965 to 1973. He was a co-founding member of Nite City from 1977 to 1978, and of Manzarek–Krieger from 2001 […]

Thomas Sheehan on Heidegger & Technology

Thomas Sheehan is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford and specializes in contemporary European philosophy and its relation to religious questions, with particular interests in Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Loyola University of Chicago since 1972. He received his B.A. from St. Patrick's College and his Ph.D. from Fordham […]

Amir Eshel on Franz Kafka

Amir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies; Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature; Chair of Graduate Studies, German Studies; and, since 2005 the Director of The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Sopgli Institute for International Studies. His research focuses on the contemporary novel, twentieth century German culture, German-Jewish history and […]

Robert Harrison on animal rights

Tamara Kayali on Bioethics

Tamara Kayali completed her PhD at Cambridge University in 2011. Her PhD dissertation focused on issues of control, responsibility and the self in depression and used qualitative interviews with women to explore this topic. She completed a Bachelor's in Biotechnology from the Australian National University before studying Bioethics in her Honours year at the Unit […]

“It stuns me every time”: Lena Herzog on the Uncanny Powers of Photography

Lena Herzog is a visual artist and photographer who develops thoughts and ideas as well as images. In his introduction to the conversation, Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison suggests that her camera follows Joseph Conrad's aesthetic creed to “render the highest kind of justice to the visible world.” Harrison and Herzog discuss the cultural transition to […]

Paul Robinson on Charles Darwin

Paul Robinson has been teaching at Stanford since 1967 and is the Richard W. Lyman Professor in the Humanities (Emeritus) in the Department of History. Before coming to Stanford, he studied at Yale and Harvard, where he got his PhD. He works on the history of European (and sometimes American) thought in the 19th and […]

Martin Lewis and Asya Pereltsvaig on the Origins of Language

Martin Lewis is a Senior Lecturer in International History in the Department of History at Stanford University. He studied at UC-Santa Cruz and UC-Berkeley, receiving his PhD in Geography in 1987. His dissertation, and first book, examined the interplay among economic development, environmental degradation, and cultural change in the highlands of northern Luzon in the […]

Robert Harrison on Margaret Fuller