Department: H&S Division of Literatures, Cultures, & Languages
Contacts
Office: Building 260, Rooms 127-128
Mail Code: 94305-2005
Phone: (650) 724-1333; Fax: (650) 725-9306
Email: dlcl@stanford.edu
Website: http://dlcl.stanford.edu
Courses offered by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages are listed under the subject code DLCL on the Stanford Bulletin's Explore Courses web site.
The Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages consists of:
Five academic departments
Eight focal groups:
Collaborative Teaching Project
Humanities Education
Materia
PATH+ (Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew)
Philosophy and Literature
Renaissances
The Contemporary and Workshop in Poetics
And the Language Center, which oversees language instruction at Stanford.
The division brings together scholars and teachers dedicated to the study of literatures, cultures, and languages from humanistic and interdisciplinary perspectives. The departments in the division are distinguished by the quality and versatility of their faculty, a wide variety of approaches to cultural traditions and expressions, and the intense focus on the mastery of languages. This wealth of academic resources, together with small classes and the emphasis on individual advising, creates a superior opportunity for students who wish to be introduced to or develop a deeper understanding of non-English speaking cultures.
The division's departments and the Language Center offer instruction at all levels, including introductory and general courses that do not require knowledge of a language other than English. These courses satisfy a variety of undergraduate requirements and can serve as a basis for developing a minor or a major program in the member departments. The more advanced and specialized courses requiring skills in a particular language are listed under the relevant departments, as are descriptions of the minor and major programs.
Focal Groups
While the five departments in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages serve common interests in literary and cultural traditions and their languages, the DLCL's Focal Groups bring together faculty members and graduate students who share topics and approaches that range across languages and national literatures. These groups are designed to respond directly to the research interests of the faculty as a community, and reflect long-term commitments by the participants. They are conceived as portals that open from the Division outward to the wider community of literary and humanities scholars at Stanford. The membership may include any member of the Stanford faculty or any Ph.D. student with an interest in the topic. Most Focal Groups include participants from several humanities departments outside the DLCL.
Thus the DLCL is characterized by two axes of intellectual inquiry:
the departmental axis, which is organized by language, nation, and culture
the focal axis, which may be organized by genre, period, methodology, or other criteria.
The convergence of the two axes, departments and Focal Groups, locates faculty members and graduate students in at least two intersecting communities. The DLCL believes that this convergence gives institutional form to the intellectual conditions under which many scholars of literature and culture presently work.
Each Focal Group maintains a standing research workshop at which both faculty and graduate student members discuss their work. Several Focal Groups offer formal courses; and all groups are responsible for overseeing research-oriented activities and extracurricular events in the relevant area, including sponsoring conferences, publications, podcasts, and other activities that disseminate the outcomes of their research.
Collaborative Teaching Project
Chair: Laura Wittman (French and Italian)
The Collaborative Teaching Project (CTP) has supported Stanford faculty and graduate students by offering a series of team-taught courses in the humanities, with the goal of preparing graduate students for careers as liberal arts educators. CTP thus facilitates and funds collaborations between one faculty member and 1-2 graduate students in order to co-teach a course. The graduate students and their faculty mentor work together on as many aspects of the course as possible, including syllabus, gathering and choosing materials, preparing assignments, lectures, presentations, class activities, and other in-class events, grading and feedback, evaluation of the course itself, and so on.
Humanities Education
Chair: Russell Berman (Comparative Literature, German Studies)
Faculty Members: Cécile Alduy (French and Italian), Elizabeth Bernhardt (German Studies, Language Center), Eamonn Callan (School of Education), Adrian Daub (German Studies), Thomas Ehrlich (School of Education), Marisa Galvez (French and Italian), Pam Grossman (School of Education), Orrin Robinson (German Studies), Gabriella Safran (Slavic Languages and Literatures), Kathryn Starkey (German Studies), Mitchell Stevens (School of Education), Guadalupe Valdés (School of Education)
Web Site: https://dlcl.stanford.edu/groups/humanities-education-0
The Focal Group on Humanities Education explores issues concerning teaching and learning in the humanities, including research on student learning, innovation in pedagogy, the role of new technologies in humanities instruction, and professional issues for humanities teachers at all educational levels.
Materia
Chair: Héctor Hoyos (Iberian and Latin American Cultures)
Web Site: https://dlcl.stanford.edu/courses/2018-2019-dlcl-221
MATERIA is a new discursive space on campus for sustained intellectual exchange on a central tendency in contemporary criticism: the decentering of humans as “our object of study.” We are an inclusive, interdisciplinary group that finds in the notion of post-anthropocentrism an umbrella for some of the most interesting debates of recent years. These span not only post-humanism and new materialism, but also animal and object studies.
Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (PATH+)
Chair: Alexander Key (Comparative Literature)
PATH+ is a DLCL focal group that is considering the future of Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew languages, literatures, and cultures in the DLCL. The PATH+ conversation includes scholars, artists, and intellectuals working in and around these languages, literatures, and cultures from across Stanford and from peer institutions internationally.
Philosophy and Literature
Chairs: R. Lanier Anderson (Philosophy), Joshua Landy (French and Italian)
Faculty Members: Keith Baker (History), John Bender (Comparative Literature, English), Russell Berman (Comparative Literature, German Studies), Alexis Burgess (Philosophy), Martón Dornbach (German Studies), Jean-Pierre Dupuy (French and Italian), Amir Eshel (Comparative Literature, German Studies), Gregory Freidin (Slavic Languages and Literatures), Robert Harrison (French and Italian), David Hills (Philosophy), Héctor Hoyos (Iberian and Latin American Cultures), Michelle Karnes (English), Alexander Key (Comparative Literature), Sianne Ngai (English), Marília Librandi Rocha (Iberian and Latin American Cultures), Joan Ramon Resina (Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Comparative Literature), Nariman Skakov (Slavic Languages and Literatures), Blakey Vermeule (English), Laura Wittman (French and Italian), Lee Yearley (Religious Studies)
Web Site: https://dlcl.stanford.edu/groups/philosophy-and-literature
The Focal Group on Philosophy and Literature brings together faculty and students from nine departments to investigate questions in aesthetics and literary theory, philosophically-inflected literary texts, and the form of philosophical writings. Fields of interest include both continental and analytic philosophy, as well as cognitive science, political philosophy, rational choice theory, and related fields. The group offers undergraduate tracks within eight majors, a graduate workshop, and a lecture series.
Renaissances
Chair: Roland Greene (Comparative Literature, English)
Faculty Members: Cécile Alduy (French and Italian), Shahzad Bashir (Religious Studies), Paula Findlen (History), Tamar Herzog (History), Nicholas Jenkins (English), Alexander Key (Comparative Literature), David Lummus (French and Italian), Bissera Pentcheva (Art and Art History), Morten Steen Hansen (Art and Art History).
Web Site: http://dlcl.stanford.edu/groups/renaissances
The Renaissances Group brings together faculty members and students from over a dozen departments at Stanford to consider the present and future of early modern literary studies (a period spanning the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries). Taking seriously the plural form of the group's name, we seek to explore the early modern period from a wide range of disciplinary, cultural, linguistic, and geographical perspectives.
The Contemporary
Chair: Amir Eshel (Comparative Literature, German Studies)
Web Site: https://dlcl.stanford.edu/content/contemporary
The Contemporary focal group examines “the contemporary” with a focus on defining moments such as 1945, 1973, 1989, and 2001. Building upon a 3 year body of work as a DLCL research group, The Contemporary focal group has particularly focused on U.S., European, and Middle Eastern cultural and political forces that characterize our “contemporary.” The group employs a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the hybrid term “contemporary” as it intersects various fields and serves as a heuristic device to understand phenomena in politics, culture, and the arts.
Workshop in Poetics
Chairs: Roland Greene (Comparative Literature, English), Nicholas Jenkins (English)
Faculty Members: Marisa Galvez (French and Italian), Alexander Key (Comparative Literature)
Web Site: http://dlcl.stanford.edu/workshop-poetics-0+
The Workshop in Poetics Focal Group is concerned with the theoretical and practical dimensions of the reading and criticism of poetry. During the five years of its existence, the Workshop has become a central venue at Stanford enabling participants to share their individual projects in a general conversation outside of disciplinary and national confinements. The two dimensions that the workshop sees as urgent are:
poetics in its specificity as an arena for theory and interpretive practice.
historical poetics as a particular set of challenges for the reader and scholar.
The core mission is to offer Stanford graduate students a space to develop and critique their current projects.
Faculty
Division Chair: Cécile Alduy
Graduate Advising
For a statement of University policy on graduate advising, see the Graduate Advising section of this bulletin.