Stanford Global Studies faculty are essential to the division's efforts to grow international awareness and understanding at Stanford and beyond. The hundreds of faculty affiliated with SGS centers and programs represent every school at Stanford - business, earth sciences, education, engineering, law, medicine, and humanities and sciences - as well as many of Stanford's centers and institutes.
In this series, faculty members who make up the SGS community discuss their life experiences, research interests, and scholarship.
My inspirations and motivations most often come finding things that no one else seems interested in and trying to figure out why and what those things mean. I think a lot of extraordinary things are overlooked as they may appear so normal as to be unremarkable, simply the way things are. Critical theory teaches us that it is exactly those things that we don’t question that are most in need of investigation. Read more about Anna Bigelow.
My whole job as an English professor is to reveal the centrality of cultural production in the Global South to what we think of as traditionally northern, western, or (heaven forfend) universal concepts. Read more about Roanne Kantor.
My study of the Middle East was always a journey of self-exploration and a quest for intellectual, artistic, and political liberation, just as it was my way of contributing to the production of knowledge about a misunderstood area of the world. Read more about Samer Al-Saber.
I first chanced upon the field of South Asian religions, and Religious Studies as a whole, as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. The academic study of religion, as I first discovered as an enthusiastic and impressionable first-year student, addressed many of the foundational questions that had inspired my pursuit of an academic career. Read more about Elaine Fisher.
As an undergraduate student in St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, in the early 1990s, I was an English literature major (after battling parental insistence that I study medicine or engineering!). Amidst all the Chaucer, Donne, Austen, and Hemingway, we happened to watch — in a course on adaptation taught by Sangeeta Datta (now an independent scholar-filmmaker in the UK) ... Read more about Usha Iyer.
I’m from Pakistan so a lot of the questions I think about are informed by having grown up in the region, as well as through the cumulative experience of working on these topics over time. At Lahore University of Management Sciences, I worked for my undergraduate thesis supervisor as a research assistant on one of his projects, which was about the intergenerational mobility of education in rural Punjab. Read more about Saad Gulzar.
