Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

The Ethos of “Cool”: Robert Harrison on Jim Morrison and The Doors “Hot is momentary. It quickly turns to ashes. But cool stays cool.” Fifty years ago, the award-winning album The Doors was released into the world – a landmark debut for what would become L.A.’s biggest band. The Doors and its lead singer Jim Morrison have […]

Laura Wittman primarily works on 19th- and 20th-century Italian and French literature in a comparative perspective, and in particular is interested in connections between modernity, a new spirituality, the twentieth century religion of politics, and the literary expressions thereof. She is also interested in exploring the role of the ineffable, the mystical, and the body in […]

Thomas Sheehan, a Stanford professor of religious studies and Heidegger scholar, guides a deep read of Being and Time. He explores Heidegger's critique of psychologism, logos and aletheia, Dasein's structures like thrownness and projection, mood and dread, temporality as care, and the tensions between Heidegger's later poetry and his phenomenology.

Thomas Harrison is Professor of Italian at UCLA, where he has been since 1994. He received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and his M.Phil. and Ph.D in Comparative Literature from CUNY. Before joining the faculty of UCLA in 1994 he taught in Italian and comparative literature programs at the University of Pennsylvania, New York […]

Rush Rehm, Professor of Drama and Classics at Stanford, engages members of the cerebral rock band Glass Wave in a conversation about the transubstantiation of literature into music. The group discusses their new self-titled album “Glass Wave,” which recasts great works of literature from the Western canon into the genre of cerebral rock. The conversation […]

JOSHUA LANDY is associate professor of French and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford. Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford University Press, 2004) and the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The […]

Paula Findlen's main interests are the scientific revolution, natural history before Darwin, and the history of medicine; her regional emphasis is on Italy in the age of Galileo. She is a scholar of the history of science and medicine and teaches history of science before it was “science” (which is, after all, a nineteenth-century word). […]

Mark Mancall is an expert on the history, religions and cultures of central and southeast Asia. Arriving at Stanford in 1965, Professor Mancall directed the Overseas Studies Program at Stanford from 1973 to 1985, and has led numerous Stanford Travel/Study journeys to China, India, Nepal, Central Asia, Indonesia, Tibet and Bhutan. Positions: Founder and Director, […]

Vincent Barletta specializes in Iberian literatures and cultures of the medieval and early modern periods. He is the author of Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain (U of Minnesota P, 2005), for which he was awarded the 2007 La corónica International Book Award. He is also the editor and translator of Francisco Núñez […]

Giuseppe Mazzotta is Director of Graduate Studies and the Sterling Professor of Humanities for Italian and the Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University. He has written a number of essays about every century of Italian literary history. His books include: Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. (Princeton, 1979); […]