Graduate Student Representatives

EMAIL: alaraa [at] stanford.edu (alaraa[at]stanford[dot]edu)  

Alara is a PhD Student in the Early Modern Europe field. She is interested in exploring the intersections of intellectual and cultural life in the Italian Renaissance, with a particular focus on women intellectuals. She is especially interested in how questions of gender, authority, and knowledge circulated within Renaissance scholarly networks and how women participated in broader debates about philosophy and cultural identity. 

Her M.A. thesis examined the reception of twelfth-century Islamic scholarship among fourteenth-century Italian humanists, focusing on Pico della Mirandola's engagement with the works of Al-Ghazali. By tracing these cross-cultural and cross-temporal intellectual exchanges, she explored the ways in which Renaissance thinkers grappled with traditions beyond Latin Christendom.

Currently, Alara is also the co-coordinator of the Early Modern History Workshop and the Social Theory Reading Group.

EMAIL: lz122 [at] stanford.edu (lz122[at]stanford[dot]edu) 

Longkai was born in Luoyang, an ancient Chinese capital marked by cycles of war and renewal, where deep historical layers shape cultural consciousness. Initially pursuing medical laboratory science, he became increasingly unsettled by the instrumentalism and reductionism of modern experimental science, prompting a shift to the history of science. His research now focuses on the social and intellectual history of human evolution, examining how evolutionary theory has been intertwined with narratives of human identity and societal development. Having studied in Beijing and Tokyo, he explores the concept of East-Asianness and seeks to position East Asia not as a passive recipient but as an active site in the global history of science. He is particularly interested in how naturalistic explanations of human origins have impacted non-Western societies, and what alternative epistemologies or cultural responses have emerged in their wake.