Nate Landry is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of English. He holds a B.A. (2006) from Columbia University’s Center for Comparative Literature and Society, and an M.A. from the Issues in Modern Culture program at University College London (2008). His research focuses on twentieth-century literature, culture, and intellectual history, with a particular focus on changing representations of intellectual work, economics and finance, and Left politics in contemporary American and British literature and culture. His other interests include theories of realism and modernism, the everyday, televisual and film narrative, and D.I.Y. music culture.
Virginia Ramos is a poet and a fourth year doctoral student in the Comparative Literature department at Stanford University. Born in Madrid, Spain, she studied at San Francisco State University and graduated with a B.A. in French and a M.A. in interdisciplinary Humanities with a focus in World Literature. She is working on a dissertation exploring how prose and poetry can fuse on 20th and 21st century narratives. Her interests center on poetry, lyrical novel, and multi-genre texts. She works in Spanish, English, French and German Literatures. Her work aims to contrast and theorize current trends of transnational thought.
Lucy Alford is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, and the crossings between ethics and aesthetic experience. She works in English, French, German and Arabic. Before coming to Stanford, she earned her BA in English Literature, Political & Social Thought, and Creative Writing from the University of Virginia, taught literature and social studies in Egypt, and completed a PhD in Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen. Her poems have been published in the US and the UK.
irena yamboliev
Irena Yamboliev is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English. Her research focuses on prose style in Britain in the later nineteenth century, and particularly on the aesthetic concept of “ornament” as a key to the formal and thematic preoccupations of Aesthetic and Decadent literature. She works on Pater, Swinburne, Meredith, Wilde and Lawrence, and draws on some quantitative and computational approaches to examine their ornamental prose styles. Before coming to Stanford, she earned her BA in English Literature and BS in Biology from the University of Nevada, Reno.
graduate coordinators
past directors
nancy ruttenburg
director
Nancy Ruttenburg is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Stanford. She also holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Slavic. She received the PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford (1988) and taught at Harvard, Berkeley, and most recently at NYU, where she was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia, with a particular focus on the development of liberal and non-liberal forms of democratic subjectivity. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history. Prof. Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford UP, 1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton UP, 2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Prof. Ruttenburg has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies.
Molly McCully Brown is a senior honors student in the Department of English. She is writing a thesis on Milton and contemporary long poetry, focused particularly on the relationship between Paradise Lost and Laurie Sheck's 2009 work A Monster's Notes. She's especially interested in work which bridges the gap between creative and critical engagement with literature, and in addition to her work with CSN, she serves as student advisor in the English Department. Born and raised in Rural Virginia, her poetry has appeared in The Kenyon Review.
