ITALIC Faculty
Jonathan Calm (Art & Art History, ITALIC Faculty Director)
Jonathan Calm is a photographer and Associate Professor of Photography at Stanford University whose work explores community, mobility, memory, and the layered histories inscribed in American landscapes. He often works at the intersection of documentary photography, installation, and video. His work has been presented at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Tate Britain, the Reina Sofia Museum, ICA Boston, Apple Park, and the Toledo Museum of Art, and is held in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Kim Beil (ITALIC Associate Director / Lecturer)
Kim Beil is an art historian who specializes in the history of photography and visual culture. In addition to two books on photography, Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography and Anonymous Objects: Inscrutable Photographs and the Unknown, she writes frequently for the general public about the intersection of art and the natural world. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Believer, Cabinet, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Smithsonian.
Sam Sax (ITALIC Lecturer)
Sam Sax is the author of the novel Yr Dead (Longlisted for the National Book Award) and the poetry collections Pig (Best Book Vulture and Electric Lit), Bury It (James Laughlin Award), Madness (National Poetry Series). They're the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion and have received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.
Lynn Sokei (PWR Instructor)
Lynn Sokei has been teaching for Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric since 2021. Her courses are “Place, Space and Identity” (PWR 1) and “The Rhetoric of Imperfection” (PWR 2). She has an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Arizona State University and a PhD in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has published fiction in university literary magazines such as Berkeley Fiction Review and Flyway. Her most memorable research project, as a fellow at the Center for Humanities & the Arts at CU-Boulder, entailed reading the art and landscape architecture of Japanese (community) gardens and associated museums as sites of cultural memory.