Dr. Gary Mukai is Director of the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). Prior to joining SPICE in 1988, he was a teacher in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, and in California public schools for ten years.

Gary’s academic interests include curriculum and instruction, educational equity, and teacher professional development. He received a bachelor of arts degree in psychology from U.C. Berkeley; a multiple subjects teaching credential from the Black, Asian, Chicano Urban Program, U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education; a master of arts in international comparative education from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education; and a doctorate of education from the Leadership in Educational Equity Program, U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. 

In addition to curricular publications for SPICE, Gary has also written for other publishers, including Newsweek, Calliope Magazine, Media & Methods: Education Products, Technologies & Programs for Schools and Universities, Social Studies Review, Asia Alive, Education About Asia, ACCESS Journal: Information on Global, International, and Foreign Language Education, San Jose Mercury News, and ERIC Clearinghouse for Social Studies; and organizations, including NBC New York, the Silk Road Project at Harvard University, the Japanese American National Memorial to Patriotism in Washington, DC, the Center for Asian American Media in San Francisco, the Laurasian Institution in Seattle, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and the Asia Society in New York.

He has developed teacher guides for films such as The Road to Beijing (a film on the Beijing Olympics narrated by Yo-Yo Ma and co-produced by SPICE and the Silk Road Project), Nuclear Tipping Point (a film developed by the Nuclear Security Project featuring former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, former Senator Sam Nunn, and former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell), Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo (an Academy Award-winning film about Japanese-American internment by Steven Okazaki), Doubles: Japan and America’s Intercultural Children (a film by Regge Life), A State of Mind (a film on North Korea by Daniel Gordon), Wings of Defeat (a film about kamikaze pilots by Risa Morimoto), Makiko’s New World (a film on life in Meiji Japan by David W. Plath), Diamonds in the Rough: Baseball and Japanese-American Internment (a film by Kerry Y. Nakagawa), Uncommon Courage: Patriotism and Civil Liberties (a film about Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during World War II by Gayle Yamada), Citizen Tanouye (a film about a Medal of Honor recipient during World War II by Robert Horsting), Mrs. Judo (a film about 10th degree black belt Keiko Fukuda by Yuriko Gamo Romer), and Live Your Dream: The Taylor Anderson Story (a film by Regge Life about a woman who lost her life in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami). 

He has conducted numerous professional development seminars nationally (including extensive work with the Chicago Public Schools, Hawaii Department of Education, New York City Department of Education, and school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County) and internationally (including in China, France, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, and Turkey).

In 1997, Gary was the first regular recipient of the Franklin Buchanan Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, awarded annually to honor an outstanding curriculum publication on Asia at any educational level, elementary through university. In 2004, SPICE received the Foreign Minister’s Commendation from the Japanese government for its promotion of Japanese studies in schools; and Gary received recognition from the Fresno County Office of Education, California, for his work with students of Fresno County. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Foreign Minister’s Commendation from the Japanese government for the promotion of mutual understanding between Japan and the United States, especially in the field of education. At the invitation of the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea, San Francisco, Gary participated in the Republic of Korea-sponsored 2010 Revisit Korea Program, which commemorated the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War. At the invitation of the Nanjing Foreign Languages School, China, he participated in an international educational forum in 2013 that commemorated the 50th anniversary of NFLS’s founding. In 2015 he received the Stanford Alumni Award from the Asian American Activities Center Advisory Board, and in 2017 he was awarded the Alumni Excellence in Education Award by the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Most recently, the government of Japan named him a recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays.

He is an editorial board member of the journal, Education About Asia; advisory board member for Asian Educational Media Services, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; board member of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Alumni Association of Northern California; and selection committee member of the Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award, U.S.–Japan Foundation. 

I became interested in Russia at the height of the Cold War and initially studied Russia and Russian with an eye to the foreign service. History lured me way, especially after spending a junior semester at Leningrad State University in 1970 and having the chance to travel around the Soviet Union a bit. In graduate research and since coming to Stanford in 1982, I have focused on the early modern period (from the fourteenth century through the eighteenth). In almost all my work I have been explored the question of how politics worked in an autocracy. Theoretically I am interested in how early modern states, particularly empires, tried to create, at best, social cohesion and, at least, stability, by ritual, ideology, law and the measured use of violence. My early research focused on structures of power at the Kremlin court and the influence of kinship and marriage in politics and on social values from Muscovy to the Enlightenment (Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System 1987); these themes encouraged my abiding interest in the roles of women in political ideology and practice. I have written two books on legal culture, one on disputes over honor (By Honor Bound 1999) and one on the practice of the criminal law (Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia 2012). Here I’ve contrasted the letter of the law with the workings of local courts, how people used the law, how judges and other officials played roles in the system, how the law was written and interpreted. In all this I’ve tried to place Russia in a comparative context where appropriate, trying to break down clichés of Russia being fundamentally different from European history or unknowable.

My current work goes in several directions. One is a turn to the visual -- I have written several articles on the production and use in Russia of icons, frescos and miniatures as a medium for political communication. I am now finishing up a project on images of Russia produced by foreign engravers in early print publications and maps. The tension in these images between stock tropes of the engraver's trade and eye-witness information, is one fascinating aspect; another is the challenge to assess the impact of text and image on the reader. All in all, I have found that most illustrated works about Russia present a more nuanced understanding than the image of “despotism” that has caught a lot of scholarly attention. Finally, I am interested in how Russia functioned as an empire. I recently published a synthetic history (The Russian Empire 1450-1801 2017) of Russia as a “Eurasian politics of different empire,” and I plan to follow up this theme and return to the practice of the law by studying the implementation of Catherine II’s judicial reforms (1775) in the non-Russian provinces.

Amir Weiner's research concerns Soviet history with an emphasis on the interaction between totalitarian politics, ideology, nationality, and society. He is the author of Making Sense of War, Landscaping the Human Garden and numerous articles and edited volumes on the impact of World War II on the Soviet polity, the social history of WWII and Soviet frontier politics. His forthcoming book, The KGB: Ruthless Sword, Imperfect Shield, will be published by Yale University Press in 2021. He is currently working on a collective autobiography of KGB officers titled Coffee with the KGB: Conversations with Soviet Security Officers. Professor Weiner has taught courses on modern Russian history; the Second World War; Totalitarianism; War and Society in Modern Europe; Modern Ukrainian History; and History and Memory.

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.

Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.

Andrew G. Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor at Stanford University, where he is also a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Previously, he served as Chair of the Department of Sociology, Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, and Head of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Walder has long specialized in the sources of conflict, stability, and change in communist regimes and their successor states. His publications on Mao-era China have ranged from the social and economic organization of that early period to the popular political mobilization of the late 1960s and the subsequent collapse and rebuilding of the Chinese party-state. His publications on post-Mao China have focused on the evolving pattern of stratification, social mobility, and inequality, with an emphasis on variation in the trajectories of post-state socialist systems. His current research is on the growth and evolution of China’s large modern corporations, both state and private, after the shift away from the Soviet-inspired command economy.

Walder joined the Stanford faculty in 1997. He received his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Michigan in 1981 and taught at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 1987. From 1995 to 1997, he headed the Division of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Walder has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His books and articles have won awards from the American Sociological Association, the Association for Asian Studies, and the Social Science History Association. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His recent and forthcoming books include  Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement  (Harvard University Press, 2009);  China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed  (Harvard University Press, 2015);  Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution  (Harvard University Press, 2019); and  A Decade of Upheaval: The Cultural Revolution in Feng County  (Princeton University Press, 2021) (with Dong Guoqiang); and Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China’s Southern Periphery (Stanford University Press, 2023).  

His recent articles include “After State Socialism: Political Origins of Transitional Recessions.” American Sociological Review  80, 2 (April 2015) (with Andrew Isaacson and Qinglian Lu); “The Dynamics of Collapse in an Authoritarian Regime: China in 1967.”  American Journal of Sociology  122, 4 (January 2017) (with Qinglian Lu); “The Impact of Class Labels on Life Chances in China,”  American Journal of Sociology  124, 4 (January 2019) (with Donald J. Treiman); and “Generating a Violent Insurgency: China’s Factional Warfare of 1967-1968.” American Journal of Sociology 126, 1 (July 2020) (with James Chu).

Edith Sheffer joined the History Department faculty in 2010, having come to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008.  Her first book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011), challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol. It reveals how the barrier between East and West did not simply arise overnight from communism in Berlin in 1961, but that a longer, lethal 1,393 kilometer fence had been developing haphazardly between the two Germanys since 1945.

Her current book, Soulless Children of the Reich: Hans Asperger and the Nazi Origins of Autism, investigates Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, examining Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that murdered disabled children. A related project through Stanford's Spatial History Lab, "Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad," maps the transnational development of child psychiatry as a discipline, tracing linkages among its pioneers in Vienna in the 1930s through their emigration from the Third Reich and establishment of different practices in the 1940s in England and the United States. Sheffer's next book project, Hidden Front: Switzerland and World War Two, tells an in-depth history of a nation whose pivotal role remains unexposed--yet was decisive in the course of the Second World War.