ITALIC Faculty
Karla Oeler (Art & Art History, ITALIC Director)
Karla Oeler teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program in the Art & Art History Department. Her research and teaching interests are film history, theory and criticism. Recent courses include Theories of the Moving Image, Science Fiction, and a seminar on the films of Robert Altman. She is the author of A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Her work has appeared in numerous forums including Cinema Journal, The Journal of Visual Culture, and Slavic Review on a range of topics including works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Sergei Parajanov, and Jean Renoir.
Kim Beil (ITALIC Associate Director / Lecturer)
Kim Beil is an art historian who specializes in the history of photography. Her book, Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography, looks at 50 stylistic trends in the medium since the 19th century. Recently she’s written for the New York Times about tracking down an Ansel Adams photograph in the High Sierra with a team of astronomers. She’s also written about photography and climate change for The Atlantic, the pre-history of Zoom backgrounds for Psyche, and TikTok and trick photography for Lapham’s Quarterly. She also writes frequently about modern and contemporary art for Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, Photograph, and Sculpture magazines.
Sam Sax (ITALIC Lecturer)
Sam Sax is a writer, performer, and educator currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University. They're the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and ‘Bury It’ winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They're the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Granta and elsewhere. Sam's received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, 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.