Professor Harrison received his doctorate in Romance Studies from Cornell University in 1984, with a dissertation on Dante's Vita Nuova. In 1985 he accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. In 1986 he joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He was granted tenure in 1992 and was promoted to full professor in 1995. In 1997 Stanford offered him the Rosina Pierotti Chair. In 2002, he was named chair of the Department of French and Italian. In 2014 he was knighted "Chevalier" by the French Republic.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave.

Professor Harrison's first book, The Body of Beatrice, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. It deals with medieval Italian lyric poetry, with special emphasis on Dante's early work La Vita Nuova. The Body of Beatrice was translated into Japanese in 1994. Over the next few years Professor Harrison worked on his next book, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, which appeared in 1992 with University of Chicago Press. This book deals with the ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology. It offers a select history that begins in antiquity and ends in our own time. Forests appeared simultaneously in English, French, Italian, and German. It subsequently appeared in Japanese and Korean as well. In 1994 his book Rome, la Pluie: A Quoi Bon Littérature? appeared in France, Italy, and Germany. This book is written in the form of dialogues between two characters and deals with topics such as art restoration, the vocation of literature, and the place of the dead in contemporary society.

Professor Harrison's next book, The Dominion of the Dead, published in 2003 by University of Chicago Press, examines the relations the living maintain with the dead in diverse secular realms. This book was translated into German, French and Italian. Professor Harrison's book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition appeared in 2008 with the University of Chicago Press, in French with Le Pommier, and in Italian with Fazi Editori , and in German with Hanser Verlag (it subsequently appeared in Chinese translation). His most recent book Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age came out in 2014 with Chicago University Press.  In 2005 Harrison started a literary talk show on KZSU radio called "Entitled Opinions."  The show features hour long conversations with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists.  Robert Harrison is also the Director of Another Look, a Stanford-based book club.

Education

Princeton University: Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, 1998. Dissertation: "Narratives of Jewish acculturation in the Russian Empire: Bogrov, Orzeszkowa, Leskov, Chekhov." Adviser: Caryl Emerson

Yale University: B.A., magna cum laude, with honors in Soviet and East European Studies, 1990. Senior Essay: "The descent of the raznochinets literator: Osip Mandelstam's 'Shum vremeni' and evolutionary theory." Adviser: Tomas Venclova

Columbia University/YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, Summer 1999

University of Pennsylvania. Courses in Yiddish language and culture, 1996-1998

Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland. Courses in Polish language, Summers 1993 and 1996

Herzen Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia. Courses in Russian language and culture, Spring 1989

Lycée Privé Gasnier-Guy, Chelles, France. Baccalauréat B (Economics and Social Sciences) with High Honors, June 1986

Previous courses

Beyond Fiddler on the Roof

Anton Chekov and the Turn of the Century

Russia and the Other: A cultural Approach

Selected publications

"Isaac Babel's El'ia Isaakovich as a New Jewish Type," Slavic Review, Vol. 61, No.2 (Summer 2002) (pp. 253-272).

"Nikolai Semenovich Leskov (M. Stebnitsky)." Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 238: Russian Novelists in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, ed. J. Alexander Ogden and Judith E. Kalb. San Francisco: The Gale Group, 2001 (pp. 160-175).

Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000

"Dancing with Death and Salvaging Jewish Culture in Austeria and The Dybbuk," Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Winter 2000) (pp. 761-781).

"Ethnography, Judaism, and the Art of Nikolai Leskov," The Russian Review, Vol. 59 (April 2000) (pp. 235-251).

"Evangel'skii podtekst i evreiskaia drama vo 'Vladychnom sude' N. S. Leskova" [The New Testament subtext and the Jewish drama in N. S. Leskov's "Episcopal Justice"], Evangel'skii tekst v russkoi literture XVIII-XX vekov: Tsitata, reministsensiia, motiv, siuzhet, zhanr (The Gospels in eighteen- to twentieth-century Russian literature: citation, evocation, motif, subject, genre) (Vol. 2). Petrozavodsk, Russia: Izdatel'stvo petrozavodskogo universiteta, 1999 (pp. 462-470).

"Love Songs Between the Sacred and the Vernacular: Pushkin's 'Podrazhaniia' in the Context of Bible Translation." Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 1995) (pp. 165-183).

Current projects

Gabriella Safran is the author of Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire, which received both the National Jewish Book Award (East European Studies Division) and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literstures in 2001. In the spring of 2001, she and History Professor Steven Zipperstein co-organized a conference on the Russian and Yiddish writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary S. Ansky; currently they are editing a collection of articles on the same topic. During the 2002-2003 academic year, Safran will be participating in a research seminar at the Center for Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, where she will be completing a literary biography of Ansky.

Professional activities

Organized "Between Two Worlds: S. An-sky at the Turn of the Century, An International Conference." Stanford University, March 17-19, 2001.

Naomi Funahashi is the Manager of the Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP) and Teacher Professional Development for the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). In addition to her work as the instructor of the RSP, she also develops curricula at SPICE. Prior to joining SPICE in 2005, she was a project coordinator at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California and worked in technology publishing in San Francisco.

Naomi's academic interests lie in global education, online education pedagogy, teacher professional development, and curriculum design. She attended high school at the American School in Japan, received her Bachelor of Arts in international relations from Brown University, her teaching credential in social science from San Francisco State University, and her Ed.M. in Global Studies in Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

She has authored or co-authored the following curriculum units for SPICE: Storytelling of Indigenous Peoples in the United States, Immigration to the United States, Along the Silk Road, Central Asia: Between Peril and Promise, and Sadako's Paper Cranes and Lessons of Peace.

Naomi has presented teacher seminars nationally at Teachers College, Columbia University, the annual Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning Conference, the National Council for Social Studies and California Council for Social Studies annual conferences, and other venues. She has also presented teacher seminars internationally for the East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools in Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia, and for the European Council of International Schools in France, Portugal, and the Netherlands.

In 2008, the Asia Society in New York awarded the 2007 Goldman Sachs Foundation Media and Technology Prize to the Reischauer Scholars Program. In 2017, the United States–Japan Foundation presented Naomi with the Elgin Heinz Teacher Award, an honor that recognizes pre-college teachers who have made significant contributions to promoting mutual understanding between Americans and Japanese. Naomi has taught over 300 students in the RSP from 35 U.S. states.