Research Assistant
Sandhini Agarwal is a freshman working on the 19th Century Crowdsourcing Project under Professor Ogilvie. As a Research Assistant for the project, she helps uncover the lives of members of the public who contributed to scholarly projects in the nineteenth century. In her free time, she loves reading, exploring the influence of the past in our present, and dancing.

GIS Specialist and CESTA Center Manager
Celena Allen joined the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) in 2012. She compliments CESTA with her GIS experience and passion for spatial thinking and visualization while providing technical and general support for students and researchers. Celena has a background in Geography and Cultural Anthropology. She enjoys playing with her daughter Miya, soccer, hiking, and watching Netflix.

Digital Humanities Specialist
Celena Allen manages the infrastructure and operations of the Center. Working closely with the Director and Center staff she oversees the Research Assistantship program, the communications team, special projects, and CESTA initiatives to realize the mission and vision of CESTA. With a background in Geography and Cultural Anthropology, she initially came to CESTA as a GIS Specialist and Project Coordinator for the Spatial History Project. In that role she provided technical and project management support for various research projects within the Spatial History Lab. She is inspired and motivated by the creative energy, symbiotic connections, and innovative research that happens in CESTA.

Rameerah Anderson is a senior majoring in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity with a concentration in Identity, Diversity, and Aesthetics. She is working with Michael Levin and the Rebooting History project to restore and revitalize archival photographs of Whiskey Gulch in East Palo Alto. Rameerah is excited to work with the Spatial History Project as its interdisciplinary focus will allow her to fuse her passion of photography with developing a more in-depth understanding of East Palo Alto through visual documentation.

Alice Avery is a recent graduate from Stanford in History. She is working with Maria Santos on the project "Reconstructing California Conservation History," and is excited to explore and become involved in the realm of digital humanities.

Sam Azure is a senior majoring in American Studies: Native American Studies. Sam began working with Professor White on the Shaping the West project in spring 2008. Sam has helped digitize the railroads by tracing railroads, adding stations, and entering names. Sam enjoyed the lab's opportunities to think about things in new ways.

Research Assistant
Adriana Baird is a co-terminal Masters student pursuing an MA in Latin American Studies and a BA in International Relations. Adriana is a research assistant on Zephyr Frank's team studying the relationship between environmental factors and infrastructure and social/political patterns in Brazil. In her free time, Adriana loves to ski, read, and eat ice cream with friends. 

Tara Balakrishnan is a freshman from Seattle, WA, at Stanford University. She is a prospective Computer Science and Economics major, though she is also interested in Political Science and Sociology. Tara is thrilled to be working with Cameron Blevins on georeferencing and georectifying post offices and postal routes onto historical maps, which intersects her many academic passions. In her spare time, Tara enjoys participating in hackathons on campus and reading books. She also dances for Stanford's Basmati Raas, a competitive Garba/Raas team in performances across the nation.

Research Assistant

Affiliated Researcher
Nicholas Bauch is assistant professor of geo-humanities in the department of geography and environmental sustainability at the University of Oklahoma.  There he directs the Experimental Geography Studio.  His publications include Enchanting the Desert: A Pattern Language for the Production of Space (Stanford University Press, 2016), and A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Cereal Enterprise (University of California Press, 2017).  He teaches courses in creative geographical production, using digital tools, performance, and sculpture.  www.nicholasbauch.com

Vincent Bell is a senior majoring in History, having recently made the switch from Symbolic Systems. He finds the Spatial History Lab to be an uncanny match with his academic interests, and he is looking forward to crunching numbers as historical research. He is working with Jon Christensen on the Critical Habitat project.

James Bennett is a senior, majoring in International Relations. He is continuing research on the Chilean Aquaculture Industry for Zephyr Frank and Andy Gerhart, which he began in the fall of 2009 when studying in Santiago. He loves working at the Spatial History Lab, primarily because of the animated lab staff and research assistants and secondarily because of the hands-on learning that combines historical research with digital literacy. He cherishes the opportunity to be involved in producing "the future of historical education" with the Spatial History team.

Holocaust Geographies Collaborative
Waitman Beorn is the Louis and Frances Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and assistant professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.  He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and earned his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill.  Waitman’s first monograph, Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus, focuses on the local participation of the German Army in the Holocaust in Belarus. It traces a progression of ever-increasing complicity in the Nazi genocidal project. Waitman has held Fulbright and Guggenheim Dissertation Fellowships and his work has been published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Central European History. He continues to center his research on the local experience of the Holocaust.

Research Assistant
Eli Berg is a junior from Los Alamos, NM and is majoring in chemistry with a minor in computer science. He is interested in expressing information in ways that are both useful and beautiful, and in discovering new methods of problem solving. He has a love for music, the visual arts and gaming. He also plays trombone and can never say no to playing in another ensemble.

Project Manager for Terrain of History
Whitney Berry is the project manager for the Terrain of History project, supporting the work of Professor Frank and his undergraduate research assistants. She's played a vital role in the development of the Historical GIS for Rio, and co-authored a paper on the slave market in Rio during the 19th century. She is also the co-instructor of a graduate-level course in spatial history. In the Lab Whitney can be found working with undergraduate and graduate students on their research projects, developing tutorials on GIS and visualization skills, and collaborating with Lab staff and faculty on a number of projects.

Researcher
Doug Bird works on resource use ecology, ethnoarchaeology and questions surrounding livelihoods and land use in Australia and Western North America. His research focuses on understanding factors that influence variability in resource use practices among people that rely heavily on foraging. He studies the dynamic relationships between subsistence decisions, social relationships, their material signatures and conservation consequences. Currently, Doug is co-director of a long-term collaborative project with indigenous communities in Australia's Western Desert, investigating contemporary and pre-colonial land use, fire treatment, hunting decisions, and their implications for spatial and temporal diversity in domestic and biotic organization.

Researcher
Rebecca Bliege Bird, Associate Professor, is an ecological anthropologist with research interests in the socioecology of production, the gender division of labor in hunting and gathering, cooperation, costly signaling, indigenous conservation/land management, and fire ecology. She draws on theory, models, and methods from behavioral ecology, landscape ecology, and evolutionary ecology to answer questions about how local social contexts influence economic decision-making and how such decisions impact local ecological environments. She is particularly interested in how individuals solve the collective action problems inherent in common property land tenure regimes. Her current research project among Martu in the Western Desert of Australia is a broadly interdisciplinary and collaborative approach involving indigenous communities, graduate students, and other researchers at Stanford and other institutions to understand the dynamic relationship between fire, landscapes, foraging, and social organization.

Researcher
Cameron Blevins received his PhD in History from Stanford in 2015. His dissertation mapped the geography of the U.S. postal system in the American West during the late-nineteenth century. Cameron is an active member of the digital humanities community at Stanford and beyond and can be found online at cameronblevins.org.

Researcher
Ethan Blue is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Western Australia. Though his previous work concentrated on the history of American prisons (Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons, NYU Press, 2012), he is collaborating with CESTA researchers to map the history US “Deportation Special” trains.

Affiliate
Matthew Booker is the principal investigator for the Between the Tides project. He was a Visiting Professor in the Spatial History Lab from 2008-2009 and continues his involvement as an Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. The Between the Tides project aims to reveal, visualize, and analyze the changing relationship between society and nature on San Francisco Bay's dynamic tidal margin. Professor Booker has been working on this project since spring 2008.

Research Assistant
A rising sophomore, Griffin Bovee is interested in studying History, American Studies, and International Relations. He began working for the Chinese Railroad Workers Project his freshman spring and is currently interested in researching the condition of Chinese laborers and how leading political figures perceptions of these workers evolved.

Emily Brodman is a senior majoring in history. This year, she's working primarily with Richard White's forthcoming book on the transcontinental railroad: designing illustrations, conducting background research, and preparing the book's online supplement. Emily enjoys the lab's mixture of traditional historical research with design, as she happily splits her time in the lab between old books and Adobe Illustrator software.

Research Assistant
Brianna Brown is a rising junior double majoring in History and Human Biology. She is working with CESTA on the Chinese Railroad Worker Project, where they ultimately piece together the stories of the Chinese immigrants that labored of the transcontinental railroad, using various sources. If you askher, the excitement that dances in her eyes is apparent. Besides working on this project, she is also junior class president and a PHE for the 2014-2015 school year. She's passionate about history, and knows working with CESTA will be a perfect start to traveling down the road of her future. Eventually, she hopes to become a lawyer. Also, you can call her Brie, like the cheese.

Camille Brown is a rising junior at Stanford University. Currently majoring in Science, Technology, and Society (with a concentration in Information Technology, Media and Society), she is also contemplating declaring an additional major or minor in Drama. She is working with Scott Saul’s team to develop an interactive supplement to his biography of comedian-actor Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, forthcoming). As an actress with a fascination for the performing arts and the ever-evolving systems in place for the effective communication of art across genres in today’s society, she is thrilled to be working on a project that intersects with so many of her personal and academic passions.

Project Manager and Lab Manager, CESTA
Matt Bryant joined the lab in March 2012. He is the project manager for numerous CESTA initiatives, and is also the lab manager for the collective that makes up CESTA: the Spatial History Project, Humanities + Design, and the Literary Lab. Matt has a background in fine arts and communications, and outside of work you can often find him making dust in his woodshop. He enjoys good music, vintage tools and machinery, maps and diagrams, and the great outdoors.

Research Assistant
Emma Budiansky is a sophomore from New Jersey. She is interested in too many things, including but not limited to history, the German language, social justice, evolution, and the universe. In her free time, Emma enjoys knitting and baking, and is also involved with KZSU.

Research Assistant
My name is Jesse Leonardo Justino Candido, and I was born and raised in Brazil. I started working at CESTA in January 2015, as an undergraduate research assistant. As a Stanford freshman, I participate in the Rio das Mortes project, which researches marriages and baptisms records of the Sao Joao del Rey area in Brazil. Through data analysis and programming, we investigate the correlations and motivations that guided people in the region during the XVIII and XIX centuries.

Research Assistant
Michael Carter is a rising sophomore, majoring in History and International Relations and minoring in Arabic. He’s started his work at CESTA on the Chinese Railroad Workers project, focusing especially on the relationship between Chinese emigrants and their Irish counterparts, and later he will move on to assist with the Kindred London and Deathscape China projects. In his free time he enjoys listening to audiobooks, riding his bike, and talking politics

Research Assistant

Research Assistant

Thomas Chamberlain is an undeclared freshman from Brooklyn, New York. He is working on the Forma Urbis Romae project, mapping sections of ancient and Renaissance Rome. He enjoys studying philosophy, English and computer science. In his spare time, Thomas likes to skateboard and listen to music. 

(bio coming soon)

Research Assistant
Juliana Chang is a rising sophomore majoring in Linguistics. She will be working on the Chinese Railroad Workers Project, with an interest in looking at how China's media perceived the mass emigration of laborers to the United States. In her free time she enjoys writing, dancing, and listening to Beyonce.

Research Assistant
Delenn Chin is a junior majoring in CS + Linguistics. She is a research assistant who has been working on Enchanting the Desert, a project that brings together the photography, history, and cartography of the Grand Canyon, for one year. Outside of work and class, Delenn loves playing the cello, adoring her cat, and rock climbing.

Research Assistant

David Cho is in his final year in the accredited architecture degree program at the University of Oregon. He is working on the Lanciani research project with Jim Tice and Lauren Hoffman as a research consultant in providing aid to digitize the historical layers within the city of Rome. David is interested in urbanism through architecture and city planning. He hopes that working in the Lanciani project, that he would gain knowledge of the context of the city and study through its periods of change in order to visually see how the remnants of a particular city transitions over time.

Researcher
Jon Christensen is a principal investigator for Crowdsourcing for Humanities Research. He is directing a project crowdsourcing a new environmental history of the San Francisco Bay Area with museums, libraries, archives, and other partners as part of the Year of the Bay in 2013. He also has directed the Critical Habitat project, which has examined the spatial history of ideas, narratives, science, and practices of conservation across multiple spatial and temporal scales in the American West. And he coordinated Tooling Up for Digital Histories, a collaboration between the Spatial History Project and the Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford University and others to compile, test, create, and share new tools for digital and spatial research in the humanities.

Research Assistant
Vernon is a senior majoring in Mathematical & Computational Science, interested in the application of programming techniques and data analytics in varied contexts. He is currently working on the Enchanting the Desert project with the Bill Lane Center for the American West, in conjunction with the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. He is excited to take part in the project to explore methods for web-based, spatial representations of a turn-of-the-century photographic slideshow of the Grand Canyon. In his spare time, Vernon enjoys improvising on the piano, holding music recording sessions, following macro trends, and reading up on new topics of interest. Vernon is funded by the Bill Lane Center for the American West

Rosie Cima is a Journalism-track coterminal Masters student in Communications. She did her undergraduate degree at Stanford in Symbolic Systems with a concentration on Human Computer Interaction. Cima is particularly interested in exploring data-visualization as a narrative medium. She is a founding member of and blogger for the Stanford Design Initiative.

Holocaust Geographies Collaborative
Tim Cole is Professor of Social History at the University of Bristol. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge. His books on social and cultural histories and historical geographies of the Holocaust are Images of the Holocaust/Selling the Holocaust (Duckworth/Routledge 1999); Holocaust City (Routledge 2003) and Traces of the Holocaust (Continuum 2011). Tim is also a co-editor of Militarized Landscapes (Continuum 2010) which includes research undertaken during an AHRC-funded research grant into comparative environmental histories of militarized landscapes. Tim is currently writing a spatial history of the Holocaust.

Geospatial Historian
Jake Coolidge joined the Spatial History Project at the beginning of 2011. He recently completed a Master's degree in Geography at San José State University, and has a Bachelor's of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from the University of Washington. Prior to joining the Spatial History Project, Jake designed maps and developed geospatial assets as a planning intern for the City of Oakland's Bicycle and Pedestrian Facilities Program, was awarded the Bay Area Automated Mapping Association's top student prize in 2009, collaborated with Bay Area artists in multi-media art installations, and worked as a letterpress printer. Jake brings these varied experiences and a passion for cross-disciplinary thinking to his work at the Lab, providing GIS and design software support and training.

Amanda Cravens is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford after completing a Masters degree at the University of Canterbury where she wrote "Stories about pristine mountains: History, visitor interpretation and conservation in New Zealand 's Te Wahipounamu world heritage area." Amanda is working on the Tooling Up for Digital Histories and Critical Habitat projects.

GIS Specialist
Mithu Datta has been the lab's GIS Specialist since October 2007. Mithu has Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Geography as well as a Bachelor's degree in Education. She also brings with her over ten years of programming and development expertise in the private and public sectors including at Tobin Datagraphics, City of Austin (Texas), Ducks Unlimited, Wade-Trim Associates, Ford Automobiles, and Livingston County (Michigan). In the lab Mithu provides technical guidance from inception to completion for each project and troubleshoots and develops GIS solutions.

Michael De Groot, a History major and German Studies minor, worked with Erik Steiner from 2010 to 2011 on the Holocaust Geographies project and focused his efforts on visualizing European borders during WWII.

Ryan Delaney is senior majoring in History (of the Middle East) and minoring in Middle Eastern Literatures, Languages, and Cultures. Ryan has just begun working with Profess Frank on the Terrain of History project.

Ma'ayan Dembo is currently a junior majoring in Urban Studies with a focus in Urban Society and Social Change. She is working on the Reconstructing California Conservation History project with Maria Santos, which aims to understand and assess California's past conservation efforts in order to better equip potential policies in the future. Ma'ayan is excited to hone her GIS skills while digging deep into her home state's history.

Carrie Denning received her Bachelor's degree in Art History and History in June 2008 and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Sociology. Carrie has been working with Jon Christensen on the Bay Area Conservation and Development and Tooling Up for Digital Humanities projects. For Bay Area Conservation and Development, Carrie is helping develop a regression-based simulation model to examine what would have happened to currently preserved land in the Silicon Valley had it been developed. For Tooling Up, Carrie wrote a paper on the technology constraints and opportunities for the Spatial History Lab. Her favorite thing about working in the lab is the opportunity to work with people who are fascinated by questions about space and how physical space alters larger research questions like land use policy, transportation, and historic trends.

Research Assistant
Benjamin Diego is a sophomore majoring in History and English, with a concentration on the art and literature of the Medieval Period. Her is thrilled to be involved with the digital humanities on campus. Ben is excited to be working with Professor Hanretta to explore the West African university system, its growing independence, and its impact on the region. In his spare time, Ben likes to cook, watch B-movies, and travel. He most recently walked (and loved!) the Camino de Santiago in Spain, which he would someday like to visualize with ArcGIS.

Researcher

Erika Doss is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her scholarly work is keenly interdisciplinary and reflects her longstanding interests in the complexities of modern and contemporary American visual and material cultures, including the nature of representation and issues of history, memory, and identity (national, cultural, self).

Dartmouth College Research Assistant
Lucas Dube is a junior majoring in Classical Archaeology at Dartmouth College. At Dartmouth, he is the President of the Italian Club and a member of the Dartmouth Classics Society.  He participated in the Classics Foreign Study Program in Rome in the fall of 2013, traveling extensively throughout Italy and spending a week in Turkey. His mother is Italian and, as a result, he spent many summers in Italy and received dual citizenship. 

Researcher
Stuart Dunn is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King's College London. He is archaeologist with wide ranging interests in digital methods and spatial humanities. His current projects include spatial narrative theory, Cypriot cultural heritage and the archaeology of movement. Stuart gained a highly interdisciplinary PhD on Aegean Bronze Age chronology from the University of Durham in 2002, conducting fieldwork and research visits in Melos, Crete and Santorini. Having developed research interests in GIS, he subsequently became a Research Assistant on the AHRC’s ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme, and in 2006, moved to King's to become a Research Associate at the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre, after which he became a Lecturer. Stuart leads numerous projects in the area of visualisation, GIS and digital humanities. You can find his blog at http://www.stuartdunn.wordpress.com.

Researcher
Dan Edelstein is professor of French at Stanford University, whose primary area of research is the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He is also a PI on the Mapping the Republic of Letters project at Stanford. At the Lab, he will be working on mapping and analyzing early-modern correspondence networks.

Eric Eichelberger found his way to Palo Alto after 18 years of incubation amidst the humid sprawl of Atlanta, Georgia. At Stanford, he studies film as well as comparative literature, and at CESTA, he works primarily within Michael Levin's Rebooting History project, currently engaging with oral histories from East Palo Alto in an attempt to identify best practices for editing oral histories.

Literary Lab
Laura Eidem is a PhD candidate in Stanford's Department of English. Her interests lie in the digital humanities and computational literary history, particularly in researching the geographic change of literature's settings over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries.

A sophomore at Stanford, Anne Evered has lived in various corners of the United States, from Washington DC to Minneapolis to San Diego. She enjoys traveling and reading and is an avid board game player. She is fascinated by issues of design and how spatial arrangement affects how we conceive of the world, whether it be a website or the architectural design for a library. Anne is currently working on the Year of the Bay and 500 Novels projects, which seek to determine how crowd-sourcing might be used for research in the humanities.

Liz Fenje is a senior, majoring in History and minoring in International Relations. She is working with Andy Robichaud on the Animal City project, which is investigating the role animals played in shaping 19th century cities, with a particular focus on San Francisco. Liz is excited to work in the Spatial History Lab as its interdisciplinary nature fuses her interests of history and visual design.

Researcher
Luciano is Associate Professor at the Federal Fluminense University (UFF) in Rio de Janeiro.  For more than twenty years now he has been studying rebellions in Portuguese America with an emphasis on political discourse and Iberian political culture.

During his recent post-doctoral stint at Stanford Professor Figueiredo has attempted to examine rebellions in British and Portuguese America in light of issues raised by special history and digital humanity.
 
Professor Figueiredo received his PhD at the University of São Paulo in 1996, defending a dissertation dealing with fiscal policies and rebellion in colonial Brazil.  He was awarded a Lampadia Foundation grant as a visiting research fellow at Brown University and studied at Boston College with a scholarship from the Fulbright Commission.  The work undertaken at those institutions led to comparative studies of rebellions in British and Portuguese America.   

He is a Research of the Brazilian National Council of Research and a member of Companhia das Índias the Nucleus of Colonial Iberian History in the Early Modern Era at the UFF. He is the author of Rebeliões no Brasil colônia (Rio de Janeiro, 2005), a number of other books and numerous articles in academic journals.  He is also the founder and editor of the website Impressões Rebeldes that posts documents and discussions relating to political conflict in Brazilian history.  www.historia.uff.br/impressoesrebeldes

Kevin Fischer loves maps, and anything to do with maps. He is currently a sophomore history major working on the Shaping the West project with Professor Richard White. Most importantly, he looks forward to applying his new-found GIS and research skills to integrating history and technology/science to modern world practices.

Katie Fite is a junior double majoring in Political Science and Art History. This is her second year at the lab working with Andrew Gerhart to study the impact of aquaculture and the salmon farming industry on Chilean society. This year, she looks forward to learning more about the complex interactions between global businesses, Chilean civil society, and the environment.

Research Assistant
Mark Flores was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, and misses the weather. Outside of work, he’s a coterm (master’s student) studying Sociology (he majored in English and Human Biology for undergrad) and takes good care of his fake plants. At CESTA, he’s a graduate assistant whose responsibilities include advising the undergraduate research assistants and eating all the leftover snacks. He formerly did research for the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project.

Victoria Flores is a senior majoring in Studio Art while also pursuing minors in Computer Science and Architectural Design. She is working with the Cigarette Citadels project, exploring the history of tobacco with special emphasis on its production and consumption as related to the industry's factories. She is particularly interested in data as a media for intelligent design and aesthetics.

Research Assistant
Nicole Follmann is a senior majoring in anthropology with a minor in Spanish. She had initially planned to major in archaeology and is happy to have the opportunity to revisit the discipline with the Archaeology of Place in Ancient Cyprus project. Originally from Iowa, her personal research has focused on agricultural transitions and transnational exchange in Iowa and Argentina. She is writing an honors thesis about how corn and soybean farmers in central Iowa respond to critiques about their "industrial" farming methods and how this influences the ways beginning farmers choose to enter the field. Apart from studying food production, Nicole likes to grow and eat her own food in her garden at home in Iowa and at the house Columbae at Stanford.

Maxine Fonua is a sophomore majoring in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She is particularly interested in the impact of race in urban settings. After learning of East Palo Alto's history and redevelopment, she joined the Rebooting History project in hopes to further her understanding of residents' experiences and the impact urban change has had on youth.

Research Assistant
Charles Foster is an undergraduate student from Chicago majoring in Symbolic Systems and interested in the cross-section of rapid technological change and human civilization. He began in April of 2015 as a Research Assistant in CESTA and is excited to be continuing through the summer, working with the Very Rev. Dr. Jane Shaw, Dean of Religious Life. Professor Shaw's project aims to map Spiritual Networks in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English-speaking world.

Emily Francis is a rising senior at Princeton University majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with certificates in Environmental Studies and Dance. She is currently working as the teaching assistant for a Princeton Marine Biology field course at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences. Later this summer, she will join the Reconstructing California Conservation History project to analyze the carbon stock and sink potential of timberlands that were converted to state parks in the redwood forests of Santa Cruz and San Mateo County. Emily is excited to contribute to the work of the Spatial History Project and to use spatial analysis as a tool for understanding long-term effects of complex land-use histories.

Anne Fredell is a senior, majoring in International Relations with a specialization in comparative political and historical analysis. This summer, she is working with Martin Lewis to construct an atlas that depicts global economic and social data in a non-state-based framework. She is interested in international development and is excited to further explore this topic in the Spatial History Lab through GIS.

Research Assistant
Krista Fryauff is a fourth year undergraduate student at Stanford University pursuing a Computer Science degree with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction. She is currently assisting in the production of accessible, user oriented interfaces for the benefit of research efficiency.  Krista is interested in the use of technology as a tool to support other fields and communities.

Research Assistant
Annie Fryman graduated in June with a B.S. in Architectural Design & Engineering, and she is from the beautiful bluegrass of Lexington, Kentucky. At CESTA, she works with Allyson Hobbs on a microhistory of the Great Migration. Her research focuses on using GIS technology and 1949 Negro Motorist Green Book as platforms to explore the complex social, political, and economic landscape critical to the experiences of black business owners and travelers during Jim Crow. Annie’s interests lie at the intersection of historical narrative, transportation, social equity, and urban design, and she is thrilled to bring these passions and curiosities to this young and interdisciplinary project. Outside of the workday, Annie can usually be found sketching, writing, or cycling.

Research Assistant
Kevin Garcia is a senior undergraduate at Stanford studying Classics (Greek/Latin track) and French. As a Research Assistant with Professor Stuart Dunn on The Archaeology of Place in Ancient Cyprus, he is thrilled to be working on a project which focuses on the intersection of antiquity, toponymy, and digital humanities. Kevin enjoys watching (and performing in) musicals, going to art museums, and spending hours on hours in bookstores.

Research Assistant
Albert is an undergraduate research assistant for CESTA. He loves being able to tease out a story from the wall of data presented to him. He works under Professor Gordon and her project studying thirty years of ant colony activity. The project looks at the activity of a large group of ant colonies, and what provokes them to act when they do. Albert began work in CESTA in spring of 2017 and continues to do so now.

Jonathan Gelbart is a sophomore majoring in International Relations. He has just begun working with Professor Booker on the Between the Tides project. Jonathan hopes to use his ArcGIS experience to advance the lab's goal of better understanding and exploring history with visualizations.

Research Assistant
Grace Geng is a sophomore majoring in Economics and Mathematical & Computational Science. She is passionate about research, especially data collecting and processing. Grace is very excited to be working at CESTA this year because she loves to see how one humanity topic can be approached through different angles and how technologies can improve humanity studies.

Taz George is a Senior majoring in Sociology and Italian, and is working on the Reconstructing California Conservation History project. Before joining the Spatial History Project, his experiences with spatial analysis included examining the relationship between unemployment and public transportation access in Sacramento County. Taz is excited to further develop his GIS skills while addressing critical questions about the successes and failures of conservation efforts in California.

Researcher
Andrew Gerhart is a Ph.D. candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources. Now in his 4th year, Andy is researching the social and environmental history of the Chilean salmon farming industry in its historical center on the island of Chiloé.

Researcher

Ingrid Gessner is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg. Her research interests include visual culture studies, gender studies, the medical and digital humanities, and issues of cultural memory and transnationalism. She has presented on transnational 9/11 memorials at international conferences in the United States, Germany, and Austria.

Holocaust Geographies Collaborative
Simone Gigliotti is a Senior Lecturer in the History Program at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. Her research interests include histories and journeys of displacement in twentieth-century Europe (Germany, Spain, Italy), and the application of spatial and transnational approaches to analyses of historical experience. She is co-editor, with Berel Lang, of The Holocaust: a Reader (Blackwell 2005), and author of The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust (Berghahn Books 2009) and many journal articles and book chapters on Holocaust representation, Central European refugee diasporas, and survivor testimonies.

Francisca Gilmore is a junior majoring in History and minoring in Political Science. This summer, she is working on the Cigarette Citadels project, studying the historical development of cigarette factories and their impact on local economies and peoples. She is interested in studying the prevalence of cigarette consumption as it relates to cigarette factory location in Latin America, looking particularly at her home country, Ecuador.

Hannah Gilula received her Master's Degree in Sociology with a concentration on Inequality in June 2009 and her Bachelor's degrees in History and Spanish and Portuguese in June 2008. Hannah has been working with Professor Frank on the Terrain of History project since June 2008. She has been working on the Rio de Janeiro street centerline ArcGIS map as well as translating Portuguese to English for database development. Hannah enjoys working with Professor Frank to use various Brazilian sources and database information to develop and answer a variety of research questions. In February 2010 she will be going to Brazil on a Fulbright grant to pursue a research project which will explore how author Joao do Rio used the geography and space in Rio de Janeiro to tell his tales of the city. Click here to learn more about the outcomes of this research.

Holocaust Geographies Collaborative
Alberto Giordano is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at Texas State University in San Marcos. He holds a PhD in Geography from Syracuse University, an MA in Geography from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a BA in Geography from the University of Padua in Italy. Before pursuing an academic career, he worked in the map publishing sector and in the GIS field as a consultant for private companies and public agencies in Italy and internationally. His most recent work has focused on the geography of the Holocaust and genocide, spatial applications of forensic anthropology, and historical GIS. He is the author of one book (in Italian) on quality control in GIS and of several publications in GIScience, historical cartography, and hazards geography. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the 2009 edition of the Goode’s World Atlas.

Karla Gonzalez is a junior majoring in History with a focus on global affairs. She is working with Lea VanderVelde's team on the Law of the Antebellum Frontier to map patterns of migration in and out of St. Louis during the 19th century. Karla is very excited to acquire GIS skills and delve further into the history of migration, a particular interest of hers.

Research Assistant

Researcher
Jonathan Greenberg is Scholar in Residence at the Daniel Martin Gould Center for Conflict Resolution at Stanford Law School, and Director of its Martin Luther King, Jr. Project. This project explores Dr. King’s intellectual genealogy, the strategic dynamics of key municipal and national direct action campaigns under his leadership, and the meaning and evolution of his legacy, with attention to geographical, textual and visual design concerns aligned with CESTA’s research focus and methods.  Jonathan’s interdisciplinary scholarship is published in a wide range of academic volumes and journals.  He teaches as a Lecturer at Stanford Law School and at Stanford University’s Program in Public Policy.

Research Assistant
Maria Greer is a senior majoring in History with a regional concentration on "the world" and a temporal concentration on "the past," until further notice.  She is also working on a minor in Creative Writing (prose).  Maria is thrilled to be a part of the Chinese Railroad Workers project and help bring this important piece of Stanford's history to light.  She hopes that she might eventually apply what she learns to uncovering similarly "lost history" in her home state of Montana.  In her spare time, Maria enjoys working with the Stanford Anthology for Youth, visiting museums, and baking cupcakes.

Alexis Guadarrama is a senior majoring in History and minoring in Iberian and Latin American Cultures. This summer, he is working on the Terrain of History Project with Professor Frank analyzing character networks in 19th century Brazilian literature. Alexis admires the combination of historical research and visualization methods in the lab and hopes to continue his connection with Brazil through his honors thesis and beyond.

Research Assistant
Jasmine Guillory is a rising junior majoring in CS + History with concentrations in Human-Computer Interaction and Africa, respectively. She began working as a Research Assistant at CESTA for the Medieval Manuscripts Project in April 2015. In her free time, she enjoys reading, making terrible jokes, playing soccer, and doing crossword puzzles.

Kimia Habibi, a Classics major with a focus in Ancient History, worked with Professor White in the winter and spring of 2011 on the Shaping the West project. She used her existing knowledge of her home state to help further developing the "Railroad Repeats" Hart photo collection project. She hopes to apply skills and methods learned in the lab to form future teaching materials and research tools.

Leigh Hammel is a senior in Geological and Environmental Sciences. She is working with Michael Kahan on the Philadelphia Street Life project. Leigh is specifically looking at prostitution in Philadelphia between the years of 1912 and 1918. She is using GIS to map the distribution of prostitution looking at race, age, and year throughout the time period.

Researcher
Sean Hanretta is particularly interested in the theory of historical evidence and in non-documentary forms of historical sources. His work focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of modern West Africa and he has turned to the tools of CESTA to help explore the connections between West African universities, their growing independence from European and North American institutions, and their impact on the political and social life of the region. His other research involves the relationship between ritual and identity, and the place of West African intellectuals in the global history of ideas.

Project Manager for Shaping the West
Killeen Hanson was one of the Lab's first research assistants in summer 2007. During this time she helped set up the lab, research references to butterflies and grazing in historical newspapers for the Critical Habitat project, and find and georeference historic USGS quads for the Shaping the West project. In June 2008 she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford with a Bachelor's degree in English and minor in French. Killeen directed Professor White's Shaping the West project as Project Manager from September 2008 to August 2010. She managed the project's student researchers, provided direction and perspective, oversaw logistical and practical details, and determined and directed long-term project goals.

Lab Director
Kathy Harris was the Lab Manager from June 2008 to August 2010, and served as the Lab Director through 2011. She received a Master's degree in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Oregon and a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Studies from Emory University. Kathy's experiences prior to joining the lab include working as a Project Manager at the University of Oregon's Community Planning Workshop, National Network for Environmental Management Studies fellow at the Environmental Protection Agency, and Native Plant Conservation intern at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Kathy coordinated the lab's diverse research efforts, served as a liaison between faculty, staff, and students, and administered the day-to-day operation of the research facility. Her favorite part was the interdisciplinary nature of the lab's research projects and exploring opportunities for visual design in academic research. Kathy now serves as the Program Manager for Community Outreach and Education / DPS Emergency Management at the Stanford University Department of Public Safety.

Research Assistant
Dina Hassan is a junior majoring in history with a focus on East Asia, specifically Japan. She is excited to be working with the Spatial History Project and Cameron Blevins on the Geography of the Post project. When she's not busy with her readings and kanji practice, she enjoys drawing and hanging out with friends.

Allie Hausladen is a recent graduate from the Earth Systems program and will be continuing her Stanford career as a coterminal master's student in Earth Systems with a focus on water management. Previously, Allie has worked with spatial analysis using GIS to examine mechanisms of aspen decline in the West. This summer, she is working with Gregory Simon to explore the production of vulnerability in the Oakland hills by focusing on the historical development of water resources in the Bay Area.

Andy Hiller, a Political Science major, worked with Professor Jonathan Rodden on a project to create state maps with data from recent US national elections and the US census, aggregated to the census block group level.

Researcher
Allyson Hobbs is an assistant professor of American and African American history at Stanford. Currently, she is at work on a book manuscript that examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. Allyson’s book is tentatively titled A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. The focus of her second book project will be migration, a different form of “crossing over” than passing and a major theme in African American and American history. The Great Migration was a watershed in African American life: over the course of six decades (1910-1970), six million black southerners left the South in search of more meaningful experiences of freedom. She hopes to offer a different angle of vision on the migration by bringing to light the places where migrants slept, ate, got haircuts, and danced along the way. She plans to recreate their routes, keeping the following questions in mind: how did the experience of migrating create, nurture, and solidify African American identities? What fractures, contradictions, and tensions within African American identities did the migration bring into relief? What kinds of resources did African Americans draw upon to navigate the constraints of Jim Crow America on the road?

Research Assistant
Lauren Hoffman is a junior at the University of Oregon where she is double majoring in Art History, Interior Architecture and in her spare time swims for the University. She is working on the Lanciani project with Jim Tice where she is helping un-layer the enormous amount of history within the city of Rome. She spent a summer studying in Rome and throughout Italy where she had the chance to challenge her language skills and live out the dream of many art historians. She hopes over the course of her college career to get the chance to explore new skills that go along with the project.

Research Assistant
Harrison Hohman is a freshman from Omaha, Nebraska. He is working on the Forma Urbis Romae project with Erik Steiner and James Tice, using GIS technology to gather and display data regarding the mapping of ancient Rome. He likes strawberries with sugar, talking in his sleep, and apple-scented shampoo. He is majoring in Spanish and Human Biology.

Research Assistant

Celina Jackson is a junior majoring in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She is interested in racial identity formation, racial politics, history, and issues of equity, specifically pertaining to African-Americans. She is excited to join the research team for the George Moses Horton, the 19th Century Hip Hop Poet project, led by Cecil Brown.

Olivia Jackson is a senior majoring in Product Design and minoring in Computer Science. This is her first year working in the lab as a general visualization assistant. She is excited about applying design skills towards historical research and the opportunity to be involved in multiple projects.

Holocaust Geographies Collaborative
Paul Jaskot is professor of art history at DePaul University. He is a specialist in the history of modern art and architecture, with a particular research focus on how National Socialist policies, ideologies and practices have affected cultural production in 20^th-century Germany.  In addition to his collaborative work with Anne Kelly Knowles, he is the author of numerous essays on the political function of architecture in the modern period as well as the books The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy and, most recently, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right.  Jaskot is also the Co-Director of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History (2014). From 2014-2016, he will be the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.

Research Assistant
Hye Jeong Yoon is a senior majoring in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity with a focus on Intersectionality. If she could, she would choose to spend her life in the sun from bouldering to hiking to reading to sleeping. In her studies she is passionate about Asian American representation in the arts, inter-ethnic relations, and learning more about under-represented narratives. In her free time, she loves to sing with Stanford Talisman, act or direct with the Asian American Theatre Project, or brainstorm event ideas on AASA board. She also has a soft spot for campy horror, anything zombie, frozen berries, and baby carrots

Research Assistant
Won Gi is a freshman interested in Digital Humanities. He is currently working as an undergraduate Research Assistant in Professor Zephyr's team, focusing on the study of the relationship between Brazilian highway network and its socio-cultural history. He started working at CESTA on March, 2015 and will continue his assistantship after finishing his National Military service.

Researcher
Michael Kahan is the Associate Director of Urban Studies at Stanford University and is the principal investigator for the Mapping Vice in Early Twentieth-Century Philadelphia project.

Michelle Kahn is a first-year doctoral student in Stanford's History Department, focusing on twentieth-century Germany. She graduated summa cum laude from Claremont McKenna College in 2012, where her senior thesis on the politicization of German and British colonial-era humanitarianism received the History Department's "Best Thesis" award. At the Spatial History Project, Michelle will work with her adviser, Edith Sheffer, on the Forming Selves project. She looks forward to integrating her research skills with her background in graphic design and publishing, as well as to potential dissertation work on Turkish migration to Germany using spatial analysis tools.

Research Assistant
Sevde Kaldiroglu is a senior majoring in English with Creative Writing and minoring in Psychology. Sevde is currently working with Professor Ali Yaycioglu and Antonis Hadjikyriacou on the project “Mapping Ottoman Epirus: Region, Power and Empire”. Coming from her hometown, Istanbul, Turkey, Sevde has been heavily involved with journalism, and served as the Editor-in-Chief of Avicenna – The Stanford Journal on Muslim Affairs for three years. In addition to conducting psychology research on (very adorable) babies at the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology Lab, Sevde enjoys writing and reading poetry and fiction, exploring notable coffee shops off-campus and running every morning.

Research Assistant

Jacob Kaplan-Lipkin is a freshman from the Bay Area. He is working under Dean Jane Shaw on "Spiritual Networks, 1890-1930," looking at how various religious leaders interacted with one another. He is excited by Stanford's vibrant DH program and community and is excited to get more involved. He plans on double majoring in Classics and Mathematical & Computational Science. In his free time, Jacob enjoys basketball, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, rereading Harry Potter, and waffle fries from the Axe and Palm. 

Eli Katz is a junior, majoring in History and minoring in Economics. He is working with Professor White on the Shaping the West railroads project. A longtime map and graphics enthusiast, Eli welcomes the opportunity to dive in to the sea of historical perspectives that is the Spatial History Lab.

Research Assistant
Tori Keller is a junior majoring in International Relations, focusing on the Middle East & Central Asia and World Economy & Economic Development. She has been a Research Assistant on the REVS team since October, 2014. During fall quarter, she worked on Professor Jonathan Rodden’s US focused project collecting precinct level election data. After a quarter abroad, she returned to join Professor Zephyr Frank’s team studying the relationship between Brazilian road networks and social/political patterns. She will continue data collection and GIS analysis with Professor Frank’s project this summer.

Research Assistant

Oliver Khakwani is a senior majoring in STS with a specialization in Product and Interaction Design. Last year he contributed to the Chinese Canadian Stories project. This year he will continue using data visualisation as a tool to identify and explore trends in large data sets for a variety of projects.

Research Assistant
Hannah King is a senior majoring in Earth Systems and minoring in Biology. Her interests lay at the intersection of human and ecological resources and she is passionate about conserving the biological life and environments that humans depend on. She is working with Professor Deborah Gordon on the Desert Ant Colonies project and is excited to explore the spatial history of species behavior. She has studied ecosystems in Australia and bees in Illinois. Outside of the lab, she loves traveling, learning about cultures, singing, hiking, and photography.

Emily Kizzia is a senior in the Earth Systems Program. She has previously worked in her home state of Alaska for the National Park Service, the Pratt Museum, and as a bakery barista. This summer she is working with Gregory Simon from the University of Colorado Denver to study the production of vulnerability in the East Bay by examining historic logging and vegetation patterns, land use changes, and post-fire development as it relates to Oakland's 1991 "Tunnel Fire." She looks forward to using the myriad lab resources to tell the story of the fire from new, thought-provoking perspectives.

Holocaust Geographies Collaborative
Anne Knowles is Professor and Chair of the Geography Department at Middlebury College. She received her PhD and MSc in Geography from University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial Frontier (University of Chicago Press 1997) and Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (University of Chicago Press 2013), which is partly based on an HGIS of the industry. Formerly a professional book editor, Anne edited two of the first essay collections on HGIS: Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (ESRI Press 2002) and Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (ESRI Press 2008). In 2012 her work was recognized by the American Ingenuity Award for Historical Scholarship from Smithsonian magazine.

Research Assistant

Hannah Knowles is a freshman planning to major in English who loves all things writing. As Digital Media Assistant, she helps to document and publicize all of the fascinating work that goes on throughout CESTA. In her free time, Hannah enjoys music, books, and board games with friends. 

Researcher
Matthew Kohrman joined Stanford's faculty in 1999. His research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, examines links between the emergence of a state-sponsored disability-advocacy organization and the lives of Chinese men who have trouble walking. In fall 2003, Prof. Kohrman launched a new research project aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. Underwritten by a U.S. National Cancer Institute Career Development Award, this project expands upon analytical themes of Prof. Kohrman's disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health. He is now working on a new monograph tentatively entitled Clouds: Making Life and Death in China's Cigarette Market.

'Amelia Kolokihakaufisi is the College Bound Program Associate at Foundation for a College Education (FCE). Before coming to FCE, she served as Youth and Young Adult Coordinator for the City of EPA Community Services Department. At FCE, Ms. Kolokihakaufisi runs the Student Leadership Program, is the college coach for the high school juniors, and leads a book discussion and writing group. She is currently finishing an undergraduate degree in Urban Studies at San Francisco State University. As an East Palo Alto native, Ms. Kolokihakaufisi is passionate about serving her community and has been involved with community organizations such as the EPA Making It Happen Promise Neighborhood Initiative, East Palo Alto Youth Court, and the Know Our Hood Collective.

Ian Korn is in the final year of his Master of Architecture program at the University of Oregon. Originally from Los Angeles, California, he arrived in Eugene after studying at New York University, working for an architecture firm, and a brief stint teaching English in Spain. His work on the Forma Urbis Romae Project allows him to combine his loves of architecture, history, and urban design.

Research Assistant
Najja Kossally is a research assistant for the Rebooting History project, primarily conducting interviews of various community members in East Palo Alto about education in the community. He is completing a History and Math double major at Stanford University and hails from Brooklyn, New York.

Research Assistant
Kimberly Krebs is a senior from Austin, Texas, double-majoring in Anthropology and Iberian and Latin American Cultures. She is currently assisting with Ana Minian's Mexican Migration project, processing oral interviews that recount migrations across the US-México border during the Bracero period. This is Kimberly's second year working with CESTA; previously, she assisted with Ethan Blue's project documenting the formation of the U.S.'s deportation apparatus in the early 20th century. These collaborations enrich her other research and career interests, which include the formation of identity at borders, the role of education in forming citizenship and identity, as well as how technology plays an active role in both creating and blurring national borders. 

Maya Krishnan is a sophomore planning a double major in History and Mathematical and Computational Sciences. This summer, she is working with Zephyr Frank to see how network analysis can be applied to literary works. She is also interested in scientific research and building tools that promote code-sharing among researchers.

Research Assistant
Vihan Lakshman is a senior majoring in Mathematical and Computational Science. He is currently working on the Nineteenth Century Crowdsourcing Project with Dr. Sarah Ogilvie, applying network analysis to study the links between the people who contributed to scholarly projects. In his free time, he loves spending time outdoors, playing basketball, and writing about Cardinal sports for The Stanford Daily. 

Research Assistant
Julia Laurence is in her second year at Stanford where she loves taking classes in Arabic. She is pursuing a major in Public Policy and is a member of Stanford In Government. This past summer she worked as a hiking leader at Stanford Sierra Camp. She enjoys spending time in the mountains, painting and writing comedy sketches.

Research Assistant
Jonathan Lautaha, from Laie, Hawaii, is now in his junior year at Stanford, majoring in History and minoring in Economics. He is very excited to join the team at the Spatial History lab, and will be working with Michael Levin on the Rebooting History project. Rebooting History does not only spark his intellectual curiosity, but has a subject matter that is very close to heart, Jon having close family that has experienced living on the border of two of the different groups whose history is studied here--East Palo Alto and Palo Alto. Jon took a two year leave of absence to serve an LDS mission, where he learned to speak Spanish fluently and shared his religious beliefs with people from different parts of the world. On campus, Jon is very active in the Latter-day Saint Student Association, of which he is President, and he is also a part of Stanford's Polynesian dance group, Kaorihiva.

Jaslyn Law is a coterminal master's student studying Earth Systems with a focus on environmental geography. She works with Andy Gerhart on the Chilean aquaculture project. This summer, she is using GIS to do a comparative study of the Chilean and Norwegian aquaculture industries' responses to outbreaks of infectious salmon anemia.

Research Assistant
Patrick is a rising senior majoring in history at Stanford. Although he almost never strays from studying his beloved Scottish history, he has agreed to shift his focus a little further south and work on the Kindred London project this summer with Professor Jenkins. He is also very interested in theater and loves just spending the day at the beach.

Research Assistant

Karen Lee is a junior majoring in International Relations with concentrations in Comparative International Governance and East and South Asia. She is currently working on the Chinese Grave Relocation Project with Professor Mullaney. In her free time she enjoys rock climbing, attempting (in vain) to do the New York Times crosswords, and singing in the shower.

Research Assistant
Mirae Lee is a junior at Stanford University, majoring in English and minoring in Digital Humanities. She began working at CESTA in the summer of 2014, and is currently working on the Nineteenth Century Crowdsourcing project led by Dr. Sarah Ogilvie. She is excited by the idea of uncovering the networks between people that lie within data. She is the current Executive Producer of Stanford’s Asian American Theater Project (AATP).

Research Assistant
Cody Leff is an undergraduate at Stanford from Telluride, CO; he enjoys solving problems with rigorous and creative solutions. As a Research Assistant at CESTA since November of 2014, he works on the Forma Urbis Romae project in the Spatial History Lab and will begin work on the Lacuna Stories project in the Digital Humanities Lab in Summer 2015. Through CESTA, he has had the opportunity to explore several of his areas of interest, including architecture, design and computer programming.

Research Assistant
Joanna Leon, a 2009 Stanford graduate with a B.A. in Sociology, is a lifelong resident of East Palo Alto.  As a Mexican-American, Spanish-English bilingual, she is a strong advocate for appreciating the values and strengths in the community. She is part of the Rebooting History team and is excited to explore East Palo Alto's history. She is the Site Coordinator at Girls to Women, a grassroots, non-profit organization in East Palo Alto serving girls and their families through out of school enrichment programs.

Research Assistant
Gabby is an undergraduate research assistant at CESTA for the summer of 2015 on the Deportation Trains project and the REVS project on Brazil and the United States. She is a rising sophomore interested in majoring in History and Political Science, and is especially interested in the intersection between history and politics. She is from San Diego, California, and enjoys keeping up with politics, reading, and watching movies in her free time.

Spatial Documentarian
Michael Levin is a documentary filmmaker and specialist in media for community development. He produced the documentary Dreams of a City: Creating East Palo Alto for Stanford University Libraries and the Committee on Black Performing Arts. The film has been widely used on campus as background for students working in the community and as a critical education tool for East Palo Alto community organizations, schools and municipal government. Other accomplishments during 15 years of work in East Palo Alto include being Executive Director of the EPA.net youth social enterprise, working at local organizations Plugged In and Free at Last, helping to launch a youth video program at JobTrain, helping bring the UN Association Film Festival to East Palo Alto, and curating and programming the East Palo Alto 20th Anniversary Film Festival. He holds a BA in Communication from UC Santa Cruz and a Masters in Communication (Documentary Film Production) from Stanford University.

Researcher
Martin W. Lewis is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at Stanford University, where he teaches global historical and regional geography, contemporary geopolitics, and the history of Southeast Asia. He received a BA in Environmental Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1979, and a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley in 1987. His recent research focuses on the history of geographical ideas, especially those pertaining to the division of the world. He is the author of Wagering the Land: Ritual, Capital, and Environmental Degradation in the Cordillera of Northern Luzon, 1900-1986 (University of California Press) and of Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (Duke University Press), and the co-author of The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (University of California Press) and Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (Prentice Hall). He also blogs about geographical topics, particularly those that are in the news, at geocurrents.info.

Research Assistant

Fangzhou Liu is a freshman working with Dr. Ethan Blue on the Deportation Trains project, where she helps to chart migrant deportations in early 20th century America based on archival material. At Stanford, she is considering some combination of History, Computer Science and Political Science. She hails from a small equatorial island and cares about poetry, human migration, and warm weather.

Research Assistant
Annalise is a recent graduate of the English department with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She is working Mapping Emotions of London. Her interest in the intersection between literature and space brought her to CESTA last spring, and she hopes to continue to work on projects that strive to depict the complexity of the city, whether in literature or in mapping.

Kelly Mabry is a senior at the University of Oregon majoring in Architecture and minoring in Multi-Media. She is working with Professor Jim Tice on the Forma Urbis Romae Project to create a layered history of Rome’s evolution. For the last four years, she has worked closely with Professor Tice on past and current GIS-related projects, including the creation of a three dimensional topographic map of Rome, Italy. She has recently returned from a quarter abroad in Rome where—under the supervision of Dr. Allan Ceen, Professor of Pennsylvania State and director of Stadium Urbis—she accumulated sources and continued research for the Forma Urbis Romae Project.

Lucas Manfield is a sophomore working on Professor Frank's Terrain of History project. Lucas has been developing a database model for storing and retrieving data collected during Professor Frank's research. Lucas's favorite thing about working in the lab is its collaborative atmosphere.

Alex McInturff is a Master's student in Earth Systems. In the spring of 2009, he walked from Oakland, California, to Yosemite National Park, retracing a trek that John Muir made in 1868. He is currently writing about that and creating a spatial history of this "California Transect" as part of the Critical Habitat and Tooling Up for Digital Histories projects.

Marco Medellin is a senior majoring in Chicano Studies. His research interests include migration and the development of identity. Some of his most recent work includes a presentation on differing perceptions of the United States and Mexico border region at the Association of American Geographers national conference. He enjoys the interdisciplinary atmosphere the Spatial History Project provides and hopes that his work on the Rebooting History project helps develop a better understanding of East Palo Alto.

Veriene Melo recently graduated from Stanford University with a Masters in Latin American Studies. She is also a research assistant at the Program on Poverty and Governance at CDDRL and is particularly interested in issues of criminal violence, local governance, and educational development in Latin America. She has been involved with the Terrain of History project since October 2011, mainly tagging nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. She enjoys the interdisciplinary atmosphere that the Spatial History Lab has to offer and hopes this experience will further her understanding of the history of Rio de Janeiro, the city where she was born and raised. She is now working with Professor Daryle Williams on a project about Free Africans in nineteenth-century Brazilian slave society.

Dan Meyer '08 is back on The Farm and excited to work with this summer's crop of RAs developing interactive Flash visualizations to enhance their research projects.

Research Assistant
Ian is a rising sophomore thinking of studying History, Economics, or Philosophy. He is a research assistant for the Chinese Railroad Workers Project with an interest in the relationship between diaspora laborers and the development of Chinese cultural and political identity. Ian comes from Charlotte, North Carolina and likes to talk about Indian politics, Existentialism, and the most recent issue of The Economist.

Julio Mojica is a sophomore double majoring in Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society. He works with Professor Frank on the Chilean Salmon Project. This past summer he participated in an archaeological excavation in Chavin de Huantar, Peru. He hopes to continue working on archaeological projects in the near future and applying what he learns in the lab.

Research Assistant
Catie is currently a senior at Stanford majoring in Earth Systems with a focus on Land Use. She was a research assistant working with Professor Zephyr Frank on analyzing historic Brazilian trade routes by using GIS to combine historic maps with current geographic information. She worked at CESTA winter quarter of 2015. While she spent her summer interviewing cattle ranchers in the Brazilian Pantanal on their perceptions of conservation for her honors thesis, she hopes to work with CESTA in the future on Brazilian projects and to possibly include a spatial component to her thesis!

Director, Literary Lab
Author of Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), The Bourgeois (2013), and Distant Reading (2013). Chief editor of The Novel (2006). Has founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. Writes often for New Left Review, and has been translated into over twenty languages.

Research Assistant

Milan Mosse is a freshman and prospective CS major working with Cecil Brown on his George Moses Horton special history project. In addition to working on the project's Hortonizer program, he enjoys singing with the Stanford Fleet Street Singers and making apps with his friends.

Sanaz Motahari is a second year graduate student in Electrical Engineering. Sanaz is working with Jon Christensen on the Tooling Up for Digital Humanities project. She is also involved in the Shaping the West project, and is collaborating with Killeen Hanson to best visualize the Hart Railroad Photos.

Otto Murphy is a sophomore probably majoring in Symbolic Systems and definitely interested in bringing historical data to life in captivating visualizations. He will be working to that end with various groups within the lab throughout the summer. In his spare time he will watch MGMT videos on Youtube.

Nick Murray, an Earth Systems and Latin American Studies major, worked on the Terrain of History project and made some contributions from his recent research in the Brazilian Amazon. Nick is interested in Latin American history, especially that of Brazil, and is a huge fan of Brazilian culture. Nick is looking forward to helping develop Prof. Frank's projects in Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, and is eager to continue working with Brazil after graduation.

Researcher
Clayton Nall is an Assistant Professor of Political Science.  His research explains how policies that manipulate geographic space change American elections, issue politics, and public policy.  Clayton's book manuscript, The Road to Division: How the American Highway System Segregates Communities and Polarizes Politics, examines how the largest public works project in US history created Republican suburbs, increased the urban-suburban political divide, broke apart political networks in urban neighborhoods, and polarized issue politics.  The dissertation version of this manuscript won the Harvard Department of Government’s Toppan Prize for best dissertation in political science and the American Political Science Association's William Anderson Award for the best dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, state and local politics.  Clayton's other research projects encompass public policy, causal inference, political geography, and American political development.

Research Assistant
Ashley Ngu is an undergraduate majoring in Computer Science with a concentration in Human Computer Interaction and minoring in Art Practice. Her interests lie at the intersection of art, technology, food, and culture. In addition to these areas, she will excitedly talk about museum exhibits, interactive art installations, food, and agriculture. While not playing with pixels, Ashley can be found making mochi, reading, or snapping photographs.

Ashley was part of Carleton Watkins Explored team in 2013-14.

Researcher
Eunice Nodari is Associate Professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis - UFSC – Brazil, and Visiting Scholar at CESTA – August 2015 to February  2016 (fellowship from CNPq- Brazil). For more than 15 years, Prof. Nodari has been doing research in Environmental History. Main subjects: Transformation of landscapes in Southern Brazil: devastation of Araucaria Forests; environmental disasters; process of migrations and agriculture. She has published in specialized journals, edited collections, book chapters, and books monographs on nature and society in southern Brazil. Nodari is a leading environmental historian in Latin America. She is a Fellow Researcher in Productivity by National Research Council, Brazil – since 2010; Advisor – Master and Ph.D. students in the Graduate Program in History and the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities. Nodari is a member of the American Society for Environmental History, the European Society for Environmental  History and Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Ambiental and Associaçao nacional de História. One of the organizer of the Simposio Internacional de Historia Ambiental e Migrações, the main meeting of environmental historians in Brazil.

Bugei Nyaosi is a sophomore majoring in Management Science and Engineering. He works with Professor Dan Edelstein on the Mapping the Republic of Letters project. He is excited to work on creating Java Script visualizations for this particular project.

Research Assistant
Hello! I am a junior double-majoring in Computer Science and Comparative Literature at Stanford, and am fascinated by the link between technology and the humanities. I have prior experience in literary research, design thinking, the digital humanities and human-computer interaction, and am excited to combine and apply these interests in new and interdisciplinary contexts.

I am a Research Assistant on Professor Minian's History project on Undocumented Mexican Migration since January 2015.

Lead Researcher
Sarah Ogilvie co-directs Stanford's Digital Humanities Minor and leads two digital humanities projects at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). She also teaches in the Linguistics Department. She is a linguist and lexicographer with interests in technology and the digital humanities. She came to Stanford from Silicon Valley where she worked in software for Amazon Kindle. She was born in Australia and has a BSc in computer science and pure mathematics from the University of Queensland, an MA in Linguistics from Australian National University, and a DPhil in Linguistics from Oxford University. She was Alice Tong Sze Research Fellow at Cambridge University, and Reader in Linguistics and Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University, before moving to the Bay Area in 2012. Her books include Words of the World: a global history of the Oxford English Dictionary (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and (edited with Mari Jones) Keeping Languages Alive: documentation, pedagogy, and revitalization (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Cameron Ormsby, a History major, worked on the Shaping the West project with Professor White from 2010 to 2011. Her work included digitizing and georeferencing maps of Tulare, Fresno, and Kings Counties as part of her research in land speculation and the development of the Central Valley.

Research Assistant
Lucas is a senior majoring in Earth Systems, focusing on social entrepreneurship and food economics. Lucas is particularly interested in exploring solutions to environmental problems that also overlap with social problems, and usually finds that the causes for such problems are rooted in the past. Currently Lucas is working on a project mapping the growth of 19th century public water access points in Rio de Janeiro with Jorun Poettering , a visiting scholar from Harvard University.

Research Assistant
Debra Tisoy Pacio is a Bachelor of Arts Honors candidate in English Literature. The summer before her senior year, she served as an undergraduate research assistant for the Chinese Railroad Workers of North America Project from June to August 2014. She collaborated on transcriptions of oral histories documenting the stories of family members of railroad pioneers, leading figures of the SF Chinese-American community, and author Maxine Hong Kingston, while composing annotated bibliographies and recording the names of railroad workers. Her personal project on multicultural children's literature further developed the existing list of children's stories on Chinese labor on the railroads.

Sophia Paliza-Carre is currently a senior majoring in History with a focus on global affairs. She is working on the Shaping the West project with Richard White, and will be working to help represent and analyze railroads as spatial patterns in the 19th century American West. Her interest in GIS was piqued by a class in ArcGIS software she took in which she mapped the suitability of Syrian refugee camps in Turkey. In her spare time, she is also an associate producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project and loves coffee.

Sera Park is a sophomore from Seoul, Korea, studying Creative Writing and Anthropology. Her love for stories, people, and culture brought her to the pursuit of these two disciplines, and research at CESTA. As an aspiring poet herself, she is particularly excited to uncover the story of the poet George Moses Horton. She also loves short and long journeys, listening to and making music, filling in the pages of her journal, and shopping.  

Toral Patel graduated from Middlebury College with a joint degree in Geography and Political Science. She is working on the Terrain of History project this fall, and looks forward to exploring new ways to apply GIS to interdisciplinary research.

Alexandra Peers is a junior majoring in Human Biology, with a concentration in Human Ecology, looking at the interactions between people and their environments. Working on the Reconstructing California Conservation History project, she is researching how the unique ecosystems and biodiversity of California are interwoven with the state’s conservation history. She’s very excited to learn GIS, as this is the first time she had the chance to work with spatial analysis.

Aaron Peterson is a senior majoring in History of Science and Medicine and minoring in Creative Writing. This summer he is working with Professor White on Shaping The West, analyzing how 19th and early 20th century railroad development influenced land usage in the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta and exploring implications for future environmental challenges. Aaron is excited to engage with spatial analysis to draw connections between the environmental and social sciences and to visually communicate complex concepts in an easily comprehensible manner. He loves reading, writing fiction and nonfiction, and anything to do with the outdoors, especially the ocean, and looks forward to integrating spatial analysis into a career in environmental/social justice law or academia.

Jess Peterson worked in the lab from 2010 to 2011 on the Shaping the West project, and is currently studying Economics and History. He loves trains and has crossed the country several times by rail. Professor White's Shaping the West Project has been the perfect place for Jess to combine his interests in American history and railroads.

Research Assistant
May Peterson is a junior studying Classics and Medieval Studies. Since 2014 she has worked on Sarah Ogilvie's project, Nineteenth-Century Crowdsourcing. She loves the CESTA community, working with 19th century primary sources, snacks, and archaeology.

Researcher
Jorun Poettering is a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, primarily hosted at the History Department of Harvard University. Before going to Harvard she spent one year at Universidade Federal Fluminense working in the archives of Rio de Janeiro. Her current research objective is a social history of colonial and imperial Rio de Janeiro from the perspective of the city’s water supply, integrating spatial history approaches. She tries to understand the development of early modern and modern political orders and social struggles, but is also interested in contemporary topics like labour history, authoritarian regimes and the history of human rights.

Miriam Pollock is a sophomore from San Francisco and Seattle majoring in Classics. She is working with Professor Christensen on the Year of the Bay project, which seeks to use crowdsourcing to gain an in-depth understanding of different narratives of environmental history. Specifically, the project prompts users to engage with photographs and maps that explore the history the San Francisco Bay. She is excited to combine her interests in her history, maps, and data visualization through this project. In her free time she enjoys running, reading, spending time with friends, and caffeine.

Anna Ponting is a senior majoring in Urban Studies and minoring in Modern Languages. She is working with Professor Jim Tice on the Forma Urbis Romae Project to create a layered history of Rome's evolution. As a lover of both cities and Italy, where she spent a quarter abroad, she is thrilled to work on a project that also incorporates her interest in GIS and humanities visualization tools. She has worked on past GIS-related projects with the Center for Education Policy Analysis, the Center for Poverty and Inequality, and as a teaching assistant for a course on GIS fundamentals.

Research Assistant
Jackson Poulos is a Sophomore from Beaverton, Oregon majoring in Mathematical and Computational Science. He is excited to combine his passion for technology with the world of humanities and social sciences. In his spare time, he enjoys basketball, guitar and spending time outdoors.

Claudia Preciado is a senior majoring in Urban Studies with a focus on Urban Society & Social Change. She will be completing a Masters in Urban Planning this upcoming fall. Her research interests include sustainable land use planning, environmental history, climate change impacts on coastal cities, and international environmental policy. She is currently working on a City Nature project through the Bill Lane Center for the American West with Jon Christensen, in collaboration with the Spatial History Project's Maria J. Santos. Through the use of spatial analysis tools and techniques, they will answer a range of questions from park conservation to access and equity in the 40 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Her specific focus will be on answering these questions for the Los Angeles region. Her ultimate career goal is in International Sustainable Development, focusing on Latin American countries.

Research Assistant
I am a freshman undergraduate Research Assistant. I am majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Digital Humanities. I am currently working on the Nineteenth-Century Crowdsourcing project with Sarah Ogilvie. I am working at CESTA from April through July 2015.

Jonathan Proctor is a junior majoring in Earth Systems with a concentration in Energy Systems. He is working with Andrew Gerhart to investigate Chile's Aquaculture Industry from1950-2000. Jon is excited to work with the spatial history lab because it offers a unique view of historical and scientific events!

Research Assistant
Sarah Quartey is a recent graduate from the Urban Studies program, where she studied two of her favorite things: cities and maps.  She came to Urban Studies from her small town home in North East, Maryland (yes, that's what it's really called!).  Her other true loves are dogs and paper-crafting: her collection of maps rivals her collection of patterned paper, to say nothing of her map patterned paper.  At CESTA, she hopes to continue refining her R and ArcGIS skills while picking up Python.  The Law of the Antebellum Frontier project, the expansion to the Terrain of History, and an upcoming REVS collaboration keep her busy.

Research Assistant

Alex Ramsey is a junior at Stanford University majoring in African and African American Studies and minoring in Computer Science. He is interested in race and ethnic studies, technology, communication, and digital media. He is currently working on the Memorial Mapping Project with Professor Erika Doss. He enjoys playing the saxophone and is an active member of the Stanford Band.

Research Assistant

David Rathmann-Bloch is a freshman planning to major in economics. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area his whole life, he finds its geography and history fascinating. David is currently working with Professor Ocean Howell on the Imagined San Francisco project to help create an interactive exposition of different historical plans. 

Research Assistant
Gabrielle Rhoades is a rising junior at Stanford University majoring in Classics. Last summer, Gabrielle applied her knowledge and love of Classics to excavating the Binchester Roman Fort site in England. She is excited to continue exploring Roman archaeology through conducting research in the Spatial History Lab and working on the Forma Urbis Romae project this summer. Her other interests include international affairs, art, traveling, and playing violin.

Research Assistant
Nicolle Richards is a sophomore from Vienna, Austria. At Stanford she is studying Public Policy with a focus on International Human Rights Policy. She is working with Allyson Hobbs on the Microhistory of the Great Migration project, and will be looking at methods to retrace African American migration in the 1900s. She is excited to learn more about the history of migration at CESTA and apply the lessons learned to current issues related to migration. In her spare time she loves to run, travel and drink lots of coffee.

Allen Roberts is a sophomore majoring in Biology. He worked with Professor Booker on the Between the Tides project between fall 2008 and winter 2009. Allen georeferenced an early 20th century archaeological map of Native American oyster shell mounds to modern digital photos of the San Francisco Bay area. He and Professor Booker also incorporated this into a larger project that studies how the Bay shaped the economies of local inhabitants, from shell mounds to Silicon Valley. Allen's favorite thing about working in the lab was its innovative and new way of approaching history with GIS. He also enjoyed the fun and useful cooperation between projects.

Research Assistant

Researcher
Andrew Robichaud is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. History. He specializes in environmental history and is working on a dissertation that examines the history of animals and human-animal relationships in America. Jonathan Rodden is a professor in the political science department at Stanford who works on the comparative political economy of institutions. He has written several articles and a pair of books on federalism and fiscal decentralization. His most recent book, Hamilton’s Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism, was the recipient of the Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics in 2007. He frequently works with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on issues related to fiscal decentralization.

He has also written papers on the geographic distribution of political preferences within countries, legislative bargaining, the distribution of budgetary transfers across regions, and the historical origins of political institutions. He is currently writing a series of articles and a book on political geography and the drawing of electoral districts around the world.

Rodden received his PhD from Yale University and his BA from the University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright student at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2007, he was the Ford Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alexis Z. Romero is a senior double-majoring in Political Science and Iberian & Latin American Cultures. He is working with Professor Frank on the Rebooting History project. Some of his most recent work includes a research project assessing the performance of Guatemala's conditional cash-transfer program. In his spare time, you can find him dancing, running, cooking or playing soccer. He is excited to work with the Spatial History Project and explore the realm of spatial analysis.

Eric Ross is a Master's student in the Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of Colorado Denver and is working with visiting scholar Gregory Simon on the Vulnerability in Production at the Wildland/Urban Interface project. His recent undergraduate studies in geography and criminal justice concentrated on urban studies with a focus on GIS applications. He has been a professional research assistant for the past two years implementing GIS for a variety of university projects including health, historical geography, and planning.

Melissa Runsten is a senior majoring in Human Biology (with a concentration in Environmental Change and International Health) and minoring in Creative Writing. She has just begun working with Jon Christensen on analyzing and visually representing national conservation and development trends, with an emphasis on the western US. She appreciates the interdisciplinary nature of the lab and looks forward to exploring environmental change from historical, technical, and spatial perspectives.

Research Assistant
Dan Saadati is a rising sophomore planning to major in Computer Science and History. He is a research assistant working on the Undocumented Mexican Migration project which seeks to trace the rise of Mexican migration to the United States from 1964-1986 In his free time, he enjoys writing science fiction, running, and programming.

David Sabeti is a junior, majoring in Mathematical and Computational Sciences with a minor (or double major, if he's feeling ambitious) in history. He's working with Professor Frank on the Terrain of History project, spending most of his time working with the project's database. Unable make up his mind between the humanities and the sciences/technology, David's disciplinary indecision feels right at home in the Spatial History Lab, and he can't wait to apply new tools to old questions.

Research Assistant
Sarah Sadlier is a sophomore from Gig Harbor, Washington. At Stanford, she is majoring in History, Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and American Studies (with a concentration in “War, Weaponry, and International Security”). She is particularly interested in Colonial America, the American West, and American Foreign Policy. In the future, she hopes to become a history professor. Currently, Sarah is a member of the Chinese Railroad Workers project. When she is not studying or working, Sarah enjoys dancing, running, writing poetry, learning languages, and adventuring.

Research Assistant
Victoria is a junior and has been a research assistant at CESTA since March 2015. As an International Relations major, she speaks a few languages and is originally from Columbiana, Alabama, where she often visits to help in a variety of farm chores. Her favorite things in life are chocolate cake, singing badly, and corny jokes.

Research Assistant
Peter Salazar is a senior majoring in History and minoring in Spanish. He has worked as a research assistant to Fred Freitas on the Boundaries of Nature project since January 2014. When not studying or working, Peter enjoys playing basketball, hurling, and mariachi music.

Research Assistant
Mark Sanchez is a junior majoring in both History and Communication with a concentration on the American West. Mark is working on the Animal City project with Andy Robichauld. While currently focused on San Francisco, Animal City deals with the way animals helped shape 19th century cities. In addition to learning the basics of historical spatial analysis, Mark is excited to learn more about the history of the Foggy City.

Research Assistant
Emily Santhanam is a senior studying anthropology and creative writing.  She is currently a Research Assistant on the project A Microhistory of the Great Migration, which explores the importance of the Negro Motorist Green Book to African Americans as they took to the roads and traveled north.  When not working on academics, Emily can be found listening to 60's psychedelic rock and baking blackberry pie.

Post-Doctoral Fellow
Maria J. Santos joined the Spatial History Project at the beginning of 2012. She is a postdoctoral fellow with the Spatial History Project and the Bill Lane Center for the American West. She recently completed a postdoctoral period at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California Berkeley, and has a PhD in Ecology from the University of California Davis, a Masters in Environmental Science and Policy from Northern Arizona University, and a Bachelor's in Wildlife Biology from the University of Lisbon in Portugal. Prior to joining the Spatial History Project, Maria researched spatial and temporal dynamics of wildlife species and their habitat, and how these may or not be affected by land use/land cover and climate changes using Geographic Information Systems, remote sensing and statistical methods. During her research she has been awarded a Fulbright fellowship, several fellowships from the Portuguese government, and funding from US agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers, NASA, NCSE, etc. Maria brings this expertise allied with a passion for using historical data to address ecological questions, embracing the multi-disciplinarity in the sciences on her research at the Lab.

Researcher
Scott Saul is an associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he teaches courses in American culture and history. He has written for Harper’s, The Nation, Boston Review, and other publications, and is the author of Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Harvard University Press, 2003). Currently, he is working with the Spatial History Project to develop an interactive supplement to his biography of comedian-actor Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, forthcoming).

Jeremy Schreier is a rising junior majoring in History and minoring in Music Composition. This summer he is working on the Shaping the West Project with Professor White, examining the environmental implications the expansion of railroads held on the California Delta region. He is an avid jazz pianist, and enjoys performing with his band at various events on and off campus. Jeremy is excited to work with spatial analysis tools for the first time, and looks forward to expanding current knowledge about the relationships between the American West, railroads, and environmental conservation.

Julia Schubach started working in the lab with the Shaping the West project in 2011 as a freshman intending to major in Product Design. She assisted with the preparation of the website for Richard White's latest book, Railroaded.

Research Assistant
Allison Semrad is a junior studying civil engineering.  She's interested in the intersection between old and new, especially involving the built world (in infrastructure or architecture) and believes there's a lot of value in creating ways to make historical information relevant to current cities and populations.  She's really excited to be working with the Mellon Railroads team to explore crowdsourcing while diving into the history of railroads in the American West.

Peter Shannon is a fifth year senior majoring in Music and minoring in Film Studies. He worked at the Spatial History Lab last summer on developing a dynamic Flash-based program for visualizing GIS data (codenamed Project Steel). This summer, he is focused on creating interactive Flash visualizations for specific research projects across the Lab.

Researcher
Professor Shaw works on the history of modern Christianity, with a particular focus on Britain and the USA. She is especially interested in the impact of lived religion (or religious practice) on intellectual history, which she explored in her book Miracles in Enlightenment England (Yale 2006). Her more recent work is on the late 19th and early 20th century and explores the relationship between gender, modernity and religion. In 2001, she discovered the archives of a millenarian group that had flourished in 1920s and 30s Britain, and that research led to her book Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers (Yale 2011), which won the San Francisco Book Festival History Prize. She is currently writing about the revival of interest in mysticism in the early twentieth century, and its relationship to the flight from institutional religion in that period. She is also working on a project on empathy, the arts and social change with the actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith.

Researcher
Edith Sheffer is an Assistant Professor of modern European history at Stanford university. Interested in the global consequences of everyday actions, she is the author of Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011). Her current book, Inventing Autism under Nazism: The Surveillance of Emotion and Child Euthanasia in the Third Reich, examines Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, situating it within the context of efforts to define the national community and the murder of disabled children. Related research at the Spatial History Project, Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad, traces the transnational growth of the field of child development.

Research Assistant
Alex Sherman is a sophomore at Stanford majoring in Philosophy and minoring in Computer Science. He is currently working as Research Assistant and web developer on the Follow the Money project. He is interested in exploring the increasingly symbiotic relationship between technology and humanities research. His other interests include reading fiction and playing jazz piano.

Gabriel Shields-Estrada is a sophomore majoring in Biology and Management Science & Engineering. He has been working with Jon Christensen primarily on the Critical Habitat project. Gabriel has been completing mathematical and statistical analyses of factors that correlate to extancy of Bay Area Checkerspot butterfly populations. Gabriel has also helped conduct research for the Tooling Up for Digital Humanities project. His favorite thing about working in the lab is the dynamic intellectual environment with a focus on exploration.

Evgenia Shnayder is a Post-Baccalaureate Research Assistant on Shaping the West. She has been working with Professor White on the project since April 2008. Evgenia graduated from Stanford University in June 2010 with university distinction, a B.A. in history with a focus on American history and with departmental honors, and a minor in Political Science. Evgenia has helped organize and acquire historic documents, develop base data by digitizing rail lines, stations, and quads, create visualizations of Nebraska, stockholder data, California railroad construction dates, American Railway Union growth, and Colorado railroad accidents. She is also the author of "When the Loss of a Finger is Considered a 'Minor' Accident" and "A Data Model for Spatial History: The Shaping the West Geodatabase." She enjoys the supportive lab environment and freedom to pursue her own research questions.

Research Assistant
Eve Simister is a senior at Stanford University majoring in History with a concentration in Public History and Public Service. Her studies focus on museums, memorials, and memory. At CESTA, she is working on two projects, Memorial Mapping: Transnational 9/11 Memorials and the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. 

Researcher
Gregory Simon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver and the principal investigator for the Vulnerability-in-Production Project. Focusing on the 1991 Tunnel Fire in Oakland CA, this interdisciplinary project explores notions of vulnerability as a historical process marked by geographic interconnectedness, risk momentum, environmental change and wealth accumulation. Gregory was a Post Doctoral Fellow in Stanford's Lane Center for the American West from 2007-2009.

Research Assistant
I am currently a rising sophomore Research Assistant who has been at CESTA since December, 2014. I am on the Chinese Visualization program, using python and D3.js to visualize English representations of Chinese characters on the American Keyboard. I am interested in the intersection of computer science and the humanities, and am interested in majoring in Symbolic Systems. Outside of CESTA, I enjoy reading about sports and politics, playing basketball, and hiking.

Research Assistant
Holly Slang is a rising junior at Stanford majoring in Human Biology and Theater and Performance Studies. She is following her love for language by working on the Nineteenth-Century Crowdsourcing project. In her free time, there's an 80% chance she's doing theater.

Research Assistant
Christina Smith is a sophomore majoring in Classics and minoring in Medieval Art History. She enjoys exploring monastic ruins and is intrigued by Gothic choir stall carvings. She hopes, someday, to excavate remains of Roman or Anglo-Saxon Britain. Christina is also an avid student of the traditional Scottish fiddle and a wicked step dancer! When not studying or working, Christina can be found participating in jam sessions, drinking tea, serving at a local soup kitchen, and enjoying family and friends near and far. She greatly looks forward to learning and contributing to the Chinese Railroad Workers project at CESTA.

Research Assistant
Kenny is currently a sophomore at Stanford studying Mathematical and Computational Science. He started working at as a research assistant at CESTA in March 2015, and has been working on projects titled "Mapping Endangered Languages" and "19th Century Crowdsourcing."

Research Assistant
Kierstyn Smith is a sophomore from Waterford, Connecticut. She is currently studying Human Biology with a Minor in Modern Language (fluency in French and German and knowledge of these cultures). When she's not at CESTA, she can be found choreographing hip-hop routines for her dance crew, ticking off countries from her "To Visit" list, or scrolling through Buzzfeed quizzes. 

Research Assistant
Bojan Srbinovski is a sophomore who hails from Republic of Macedonia, where he learned how, among other things, English from Cartoon Network. He is interested in the relationship between cognitive science and narrative theory. At CESTA, he is a member of the Chinese Railroad Workers project.

Research Assistant
Charu is a junior majoring in Architectural Design. She is particularly interested in medical architecture and the role that design plays in improving healthcare. She has been an undergraduate research assistant at CESTA since Spring 2014. As a freshman, she worked on the design interface of ORBIS, a software used to map routes in ancient Rome. Her sophomore year, she conducted research for Kindred London, locating and recording architectural sites in the city. Charu loves to reason things out pictorially and apply her design skills to display information in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

Moritz Sudhof is a junior majoring in who-knows-what. He is working with Jon Christensen (and other fabulous friends) on the Botanizing California and Tooling Up for Digital Histories projects. Moritz thinks plants are just about the coolest things ever, and he enjoys engaging with questions of design and visual story-telling.

Alex Tarr is a PhD Candidate in geography at UC Berkeley. He is working with Scott Saul’s team to develop an interactive supplement to his biography of comedian-actor Richard Pryor (HarperCollins, forthcoming). As a geographer with a background in multimedia scholarship, he comes to the Spatial History Project with a passion for combining space-based and digital/interactive research methods, and is looking forward to applying both the history of Richard Pryor in Peoria, Illinois.

Research Assistant
Niuniu Teo is a sophomore majoring in History and minoring in Creative Writing. She is interested in defining the ways minorities in America craft their own identities through stories. At CESTA, she is working with the Chinese Railroad Workers Project. Among other things, she enjoys sharing music, reading, jamming, and driving to the beach.

Research Assistant
Helen is a rising junior at Stanford University, double majoring in English and Italian. She has been an undergraduate research assistant for the Spatial History Project since October 2014, and has worked on the Archaeology of Place in Ancient Cyprus project with Stuart Dunn of King’s College London. She loves working with maps, especially after taking a cartography class her freshman fall; her favorite part of the project so far has been matching up labels from ancient maps of Cyprus to their modern-day counterparts. Her extracurricular activities include tutoring, copyediting, and dancing.

Research Assistant
Tani Thomsen is an undeclared freshman from Auburn, California. She is working with Dr. Ahnert on the Tudor Networks of Power project, which aims to analyze social networks during the Tudor period and to link members to related systems and resources. Tani is also in Stanford's ITALIC program, and her hobbies include reading, playing saxophone, and dancing.

Research Assistant
Margaret Tomaszczuk is a junior at Stanford University majoring in anthropology with a minor in computer science. She is interested in the intersection of digital technology and the humanities, particularly the use of digital technology in knowledge production. Margaret is passionate about the visual arts, and enjoys traveling and cooking in her free time.

Post-bac Research Assistant
Danny Towns is a junior majoring in History. In past years he's worked for the city department of Parks & Recreation in his hometown of Portland, OR, and has engaged in preschool teaching and developmental psychology research here at Stanford. In his spare time he illustrates for the Chaparral, Stanford's undergraduate humor magazine, and loves reading and the outdoors. He is most excited by the amazing flexibility of the methods and tools used in the Spatial History Lab, and hopes to incorporate these techniques in his pursuit of legal studies as an undergraduate and at the professional level.

Research Assistant
Van Tran is a rising sophomore at Stanford who hails from Houston, TX. As a prospective English major, she is excited to work on the Tagging 500 Novels project and hopes to find ways for crowdsourcing to revolutionize how we think about humanities research. In her free time, Van reads lyric poetry, writes original fiction, and plays strategy games.

Researcher
Lea VanderVelde is the Josephine R. Witte Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law and a Guggenheim Fellow in Constitutional Studies. She is the principal investigator for The Law of the Antebellum Frontier project. This collaborative project seeks to digitally analyze the legal and economic mechanisms at work on the American frontier or the early 1800s. Understanding these mechanisms reflects upon how empires expand and how American expansion shaped American identity and the constitutional amendments after the civil war. Professor VanderVelde has been conducting research in this field for the last fifteen years.

Research Assistant
Riya Verma is a freshman with an intended major in Computer Science + French. She is working on Stanford's Nineteenth Century Crowdsourcing project with Professor Sarah Ogilvie. In her free time, Riya enjoys cooking and watching Netflix.

Research Assistant
Ashleigh Wais is a senior from New York majoring in Science, Technology and Society, with a minor in Italian. She is working on the Forma Urbis Romae project with Professor Jim Tice to help bring the history and archeology of Rome to light through the digitalization of the Lanciani map. Ashleigh has a passion for design, music and art, and also is an active member of the Stanford Band and KZSU. After studying abroad in Florence during Spring 2013, Ashleigh fell in love with Italy and Italian culture, and is thrilled to be able to apply her language and design skills to the project. 

Research Assistant
Matthew Walter is a Junior majoring in Earth Systems with a concentration in Land Use. He is working on the California Conservation History project with Maria Santos, and is excited to study the open spaces he grew up exploring in his home state. Matt is fascinated by the nexus between sustainability and urban planning and design, and hopes to broaden his understanding of both subjects during his time with the Spatial History Project.

Noemi Walzebuck, an Urban Studies major and minoring in International Relations, worked with Zephyr Frank on the Terrain of History project in the winter and spring terms of 2011. Her involvement in the project provided an opportunity to analyze her home city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and to further her statistical research skills in the lab. She hopes to go into urban planning in the international development sector someday.

John Watson is a sophomore majoring in Environmental Engineering and Art History. He has been working with Professor White on the Shaping the West project since June 2008. John has helped develop base data by digitizing rail lines and stations, create a quad index, digitize historic documents, and design a visualization to illustrate the way the railroad freight rate manipulations distorted time and space. John's favorite thing about working in the lab is the camaraderie among faculty, staff, and students.

Research Assistant
Nathan Weiser is a junior at Stanford majoring in English and American Studies. A member of the Chinese Railroad Workers Project since June 2015, he is currently researching Cornelius Koopmanschap, the Dutch-American merchant tasked by Leland Stanford with obtaining the Central Pacific Railroad's "coolie" laborers. He enjoys writing, reading, and arguing about nonfiction, and is a militant advocate of Central Texas cuisine.

Natasha Weiss is a sophomore from San Francisco, likely majoring in Urban Studies and minoring in Creative Writing. She is working alongside Nicholas Bauch on the Enchanting the Desert project, which aims to allow viewers to enter the world of 1930's photographs of Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks by way of digital, multi-media interaction. She is a lover of the American West and is fascinated by the ways in which people shape and are shaped by the landscapes that are their homes.

Research Assistant

Max Wen is a freshman from China. His intended major is mathematics and economics. This spring quarter, he is working with Professor Thomas Mullaney on the Deathscape China: Grave Relocation project. Outside of work, Max enjoys photography and swimming. 

Research Assistant
Davis is a prospective Symbolic Systems major, interested in examining self-perpetuating constructs and group dynamics. He is currently working on the photography of Carleton Watkins, in an art/research/design collaboration between the Cantor Art Museum, the Bill Lane Center for the American West, the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, and the Branner Earth Sciences Library. Last summer, Davis was part of a Stanford research expedition tracking Hannibal’s route through the Alps, based on geographical data and ancient historical writings. This sparked his interest in spatial and geographical analysis. In his spare time, Davis enjoys creating fractal art, writing poetry and short stories, 3D printing and designing, and making his own ice cream. Davis is funded by the Bill Lane Center for the American West.

Melissa Wiggins is a senior at the University of Colorado Denver, majoring in Geography with an emphasis on GIS. She is particularly interested in human geography, focusing on human interaction with the natural environment. Throughout the summer, Melissa will be working with Gregory Simon to tell the story of the Oakland Hills region and its vulnerable landscape.

Eleanor Wilking recently graduated from Harvard College where she majored in Economics with a secondary field in History. She is working primarily on quantitative data analysis for the 'Shaping the West' and 'Terrain of History' projects this summer. In addition to the outstanding weather at Palo Alto, she appreciates the lab's integration of new statistical technologies with more traditional methodology in pursuit of historical answers that remain salient to modern questions concerning space, society and economic development.

Researcher
Daryle Williams, Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, is Principal Investigator for The Broken Paths of Freedom, a historical study of the geographies of enslavement, emancipation, and liberty traversed by approximately fourteen-thousand Free Africans [africanos livres] illicitly introduced into the Brazilian empire between 1821 and 1856. Williams has authored Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945 (2001), winner of the American Historical Association's John Edwin Fagg prize, as well as several articles and book chapters on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian cultural history. Faculty Page

Anne Winslow is a senior, majoring in Earth System and minoring in Geology. This year she has begun working with Andy Gerhart to study the impact of the aquaculture industry on Chilean society. She is excited to work with the Spatial History Project and delve deeper into the realm of spatial analysis.

Research Assistant

David Wintermeyer is a junior double majoring in History and Mathematical and Computational Sciences. He has deep interests in both humanities and technical disciplines and is thrilled to be joining CESTA and the Francesco Algarotti project. He has a specific love for Italian history: he spent the past summer living in Bologna and then studied at Stanford in Florence in the fall. While his particular interests circle around Dante, Boccaccio, and trecento Florence, he has studied Venice as well and is thrilled to learn about Algarotti and present the project’s findings in creative, effective ways.

Research Assistant

Lis Wolenetz is a sophomore from Montana majoring in English; she enjoys stories about cats, early modern print culture, and pretzel sticks, and is looking forward to analyzing social networks in early modern drama with the Literary Lab. 

Project Coordinator
Gabriel Wolfenstein is a historian by training, whose work is in Victorian Britain, with specific focus on the history of statistics and the census. �He is particularly interested in how the making and taking of such surveys impacts the way people think about themselves and the world around them. �Other interests include the rise of bureaucracies and the popularization of science. �Formerly a post-doctoral Fellow in the Humanities in Stanford's Introduction to the Humanities program, he has lately become interested in questions of the utility of crowd-sourcing for humanities research, and crowd-sourcing in general. �He is currently the Project Manager for CESTA's Mellon Grant supported research into these very questions. �He earned his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.A. from The New School for Social Research, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Research Assistant
Jin Wu is an MA student in Latin American Studies at Stanford. She majored in Portuguese for her undergraduate studies in Beijing. She is currently a Research Assistant on Professor Zephyr Frank’s project analyzing the social impact and success of the Brazilian melodrama Vale Tudo. Jin is drawn to the cultural and racial diversity of Brazil and hopes to improve mutual understanding between China and Latin America.

Research Assistant
Lowry is an undergraduate student, who just completed his Junior year. He studies History, with a specialization in Chinese History, and also Earth Systems. Lowry will work at CESTA this summer as a research assistant on the Chinese Railroad Worker project, having first worked with CESTA the summer after his Freshman year. At that time, he collaborated with Professor Lea Vandervelde, researching the spread of law along the Ohio River during the 19th century.

Research Assistant
Laura Zehender is a junior majoring in Classics and minoring in Mathematics and Computer Science. She is working with Professor Jim Tice on the Forma Urbis Romae Project to capture the layered history of Rome through digitizing the Lanciani map. After spending a semester studying abroad at a Classics program in Rome, she left with a fascination for the city’s unique combination of ancient, Renaissance, and modern times. She is excited to combine her interests in history, computer science, and more while working at the Stanford Spatial History Project. In her spare time, she enjoys social dancing, making crafts, spending time with friends, and chocolate.

Research Assistant
Frank is an undergrad student and a prospective Computer Science + History major. Since April 2015, he has worked as a Research Assistant/Computer Programmer on the Enchanting the Desert project. He loves exploring the intersections between technology and the humanities. He enjoys playing sports and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. He also loves playing in the orchestra.

Andre Zollinger is a senior majoring in International Relations and co-terming in Latin Americans Studies, with an emphasis on Brazilian history and culture. He is working with Professor Frank on the Terrain of History project, currently focusing on mapping 19th century Brazilian urban novels. This year, Andre looks forward to begin analyzing the data collected from each novel and organizing it into a visual presentation.