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NewsvineThe youngest of the schools to be organized at Stanford, the School of Humanities and Sciences today is
--as the Web site claims--the heart of the University and a primary locus of its liberal education. Fifty-eight years after its inception, it is now the largest school on campus, with about 2,100 graduate students, 42 percent of whom are women. H&S is also responsible for more than 80 percent of undergraduate education and awards the largest number of PhDs.The school has more than 500 faculty members, 28 departments, 19 interdisciplinary degree programs and 20 research centers and teaching resources. The school is proud to offer a distinctive academic environment combining undergraduate and graduate education and training and research led by internationally acclaimed faculty.
Lee Konstantinou is an H&S graduate student who is grateful for these resources. After completing his honors thesis at Cornell in 2000, he joined the English Department. He notes, "I have had the good fortune to work with a number of very supportive and insightful advisers."
Kontantinou's advisers include Ramon Saldivar, Ursula Heise and Sianne Ngai. Saldivar is the chair of Stanford's English Department, one of the nation's top five humanities programs. Sixteen other H&S departments ranked in the top 10.
Konstantinou is currently working on his dissertation called "Wipe That Smirk off Your Face: Postironic Fiction and the Public Sphere." His dissertation diagrams the relationships between hip irony, the oppositional sensibility of the counterculture and literary postirony.
"My approach to the authors that I am looking at tries to be both historically informed and analytical. In terms of historical period, I look at fiction written between the 1950s and today, with a special focus on the fiction of the 1990s," Konstantinou says, shedding light on his work.
Some key authors mentioned in his dissertation include Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers.
H&S recently launched the Graduate Research Opportunities initiative to award its students grants of up to $5,000 for research expenses directly related to their dissertations.
Kontantinou acknowledges Stanford's generosity in helping with his research efforts.
He says, "Stanford's helped me with my dissertation by generously providing me with a stipend and other financial support as I've done my research."
Expenses eligible for GRO funding include travel for archival or field research, purchase of data sets and special analytical software, human-subject costs, and survey expenses.
"I think the intellectual life of the campus is quite vibrant," Kontantinou adds. "The Cantor Arts Center, Digital Humanities Lab, Humanities Center, Center for the Study of the Novel and other organizations have been very good about spearheading innovative projects, organizing conferences, and bringing cutting-edge scholars to the campus."
Despite these facilities and various outside donations
--totaling $307 million last year--Kontantinou believes more can be done."More funding would allow for more programs of the sorts mentioned above," Kontantinou explains.
More importantly, he hopes for further departmental integration within H&S, suggesting, "We might also increase our focus on interdisciplinary both within the humanities and outside of it."