52nd Faculty Senate Chair and Vice Chair

The members of Stanford’s 52nd Senate have elected Tim Stearns, Frank Lee and Carol Hall Professor and Professor of Genetics, as its Chair for the Senate’s 2019-20 year, and Dan Edelstein, William H. Bonsall Professor in French and Professor, by Courtesy, of History, as the Senate’s Vice Chair. Their one-year term of office begins Fall Quarter of 2019. 

Chair, Tim Stearns  

Tim Stearns holds the Frank Lee and Carol Hall Professorship at Stanford University and is Chair of the Department of Biology. He also holds appointments in the Department of Genetics, is a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute, and Bio-X, is a Faculty Fellow in Chem-H, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is a member of JASON, a national organization that advises the government on matters of science, technology and national security. He has also been an advisor to the National Academies of Science and the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Dr. Stearns received a B.S. from Cornell University, a Ph.D. from MIT, and did his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. His research concerns the mechanism and regulation of cell division, the organization of signaling pathways within cells, and cell biology of fungal pathogens. Stearns was named an HHMI Professor in 2002, for his work in science education, and has taught international workshops in South Africa, Chile, Ghana, and Tanzania. He is a member of the NCSD Study Section at the NIH, and has served on the editorial boards of several journals.

Vice Chair, Dan Edelstein 

Dan Edelstein. Born in Ithaca, NY, I moved to Geneva, Switzerland when I was eleven. After attending the Collège Calvin, I studied French literature at the University of Geneva; I then returned to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 2004. I joined the Department of French and Italian at Stanford that same year.

I work for the most part on eighteenth-century France, with research interests at the crossroads of literature, history, political thought, and digital humanities (DH). I am the author of three books (all with the University of Chicago Press): the first on French revolutionary Terror; the second on the genealogy of the Enlightenment; and the third on the early-modern history of human rights. I've also edited or co-edited six volumes of essays: "Myth and Modernity" (co-edited, Yale French Studies); "The Super-Enlightenment" (Voltaire Foundation, at Oxford University); "Scripting Revolution" (co-edited with Keith Baker, Stanford University Press); "Let There Be Enlightenment" (co-edited with Anton Matytsin, Johns Hopkins University Press); "Networks of Enlightenment" (co-edited with Chloe Edmonson, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment); "Power and Time" (co-edtied with Stefanos Geroulanos and Natasha Wheatley, University of Chicago Press). I'm a co-PI for the "Mapping the Republic of Letters" project, and the founding faculty director of the "Humanities + Design" research lab at CESTA.

I'm currently at work on two book projects: a history of permanent revolution, and a defense of core curricula in higher education. I also continue to work on a variety of DH projects.

I regularly teach courses on the literature, philosophy, culture, and politics of the Enlightenment; nineteenth-century French novels; the French Revolution; early-modern political thought; French intellectual culture (“Coffee & Cigarettes”); liberal education ("Education as Self-Fashioning"); and historical networks ("Networks: Ecological, Revolutionary, and Digital").