Magazine Staff & Contributors

ELECTRUM STAFF  2010-2012

Patrick Hunt  Editor-in-Chief

James Geary  Managing Editor

Marlin Lum  Technical and Design Editor

Melissa Guertin  Book Review Editor

Aigerim Korzhumbayeva   Staff Writer

Santana Shorty Editorial Assistant

P. F. Sommerfeldt  Business Manager

A. C. Williams  Editorial Staff

Andrew Phillips  Editorial Assistant

CONTRIBUTORS FOR ISSUES  2010-2013 to date:

Bianca Caprice Aguirre is a student at Stanford University majoring in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She enjoys reading and writing inspirational quotes, tinkering on the piano, and singing. While her future plans include being a professor and a writer down the road, she is known among her peers and faculty for always being completely in focus, for boundless energy and enthusiasm and her contagious and distinctive laugh that can be recognized long before she’s even seen.

Catherine Clover is a writer and novelist currently living in Thailand. Her D.Phil. is from Oxford University in Historical Medieval Architecture (Welsh Castles) and her B.A. degree from Mount Holyoke College. She has lived internationally in Britain, France, Italy, Japan and Thailand. An avid global traveler, she has visited every continent and integrates her eye for exotic architectural detail with archival research into regional highlights wherever she can find historical support.

Derek DeRoche‘s present claim to fame is that he appeared on the David Letterman show four times between 2006-09 for championship bird-calling – his most obnoxious call was the Horned Screamer.  He is a graduating senior at Stanford University, majoring in Classics and French. Next year he plans to not try reading thirty books a week unless he is in graduate school which looks quixotically more likely every day.

Gary Devore, Archaeologist, directed the Porta Stabia excavations at Pompeii (Pompeii Archaeological Research Project 2005-2009) among other sites including Roman forts in Scotland. He is a highly-esteemed Roman scholar and is currently a directing principal investigator excavating Binchester with Michael Shanks. He has taught Humanities and Classics at Stanford University, State University of New York (Buffalo) and University of Bradford, among others.  His Ph.D. is from University of Bradford.

James Geary is the author of I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World as well as two books celebrating the art of the aphorism: the New York Times best-selling The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism and Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists. He is an award-winning journalist; he is editor of Ode Magazine and former editor of the European edition of Time. He has presented at TEDGlobal, “Live from the New York Public Library”, the Foreign Policy Association, the Genoa Science Festival, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, and at literary festivals throughout the United States, the U.K., and continental Europe. He has been at Harvard University for the academic year 2011-2012 as a Journalism Fellow and teaching at Harvard since 2012. He is based in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Melissa Guertin has edited art history books, and is a global traveler, museum addict and omnivorous reader. Having also been a teacher for several years, her education includes a degree in art history from Santa Clara University; she has also been a postgraduate student at Stanford University and is now a graduate student at USC.

LiHe Han is a graduating senior at Stanford University majoring in Philosophy and French. She pretends to relax by performing Franz Liszt on the piano to a mostly inanimate audience. Her current interests include discovering an adequate hermeneutic for the dizzyingly droll corpus of Roald Dahl, and hopes to one day write a completely incomprehensible book entitled “Morbidity as the Literary Macabre; A Prolegomena of the Metaphysics of Neoteny in Standard Practice”.

Mary Harrsch is an award-winning photographer and photographic contributor to many books and publications. For years running computer media at the University of Oregon, she is also editor of Roman Times (http://ancientimes.blogspot.com/) and she  has a new book forthcoming in The Illustrated Gallic Wars.

Andrew Herkovic is Director of Communications and Development at Stanford University Library (ASUL), and is also one of the editors of Stanford’s ReMix publication. Having professionally visited hundreds of libraries on three continents for over 25 years, including a conference at the new Library of Alexandria (Bibliotheca Alexandrina), Andrew has also been a librarian at Cornell University, where he also received his education with a degree in Anthropology.

Patrick Hunt, archaeologist, historian and author of twelve books (including a Penguin best seller, Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History, 2007,  published in five languages), has taught in humanities at Stanford University since 1994 and has been at Stanford since 1992. His archaeology expeditions have been sponsored by the National Geographic Society (2007-2008), among others. His award-winning research has been featured in Archaeology Magazine, Earth Magazine, National Geographic, etc. He is aso editor of Stanford’s Philolog site and appears frequently in documentaries on PBS, National Geographic Explorer TV, NOVA and the History Channel, among others. His Ph.D. (1991) is from the Institute of Archaeology, UCL, University of London. Hunt has been a National Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America since 2009. He was awarded a Persian Golden Lioness Gold Medal of Excellence by the World Academy of Art, Literature and Media in 2008 in London and given a citation by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2012.

Katherine Joplin is a student at Stanford University, majoring in English with Creative Writing concentration  as well as Japanese.  She identifies with “goth” in appearance – very noir but perky – and admittedly has an obsession with Japanese anime. Katherine is also keen on Greek mythology and you wouldn’t want to compete against her in a mythology quiz show.

Aigerim Korzhumbayeva was born and raised in Kazakhstan, living briefly in Uzbekistan. She studied two years at Kazakh-British Tech. University as well as at Oxford in Stanford’s Bing Overseas program, graduating with a B.A. in 2012 from Stanford University with a major in Economics, and a minor in Middle Eastern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. A linguist, she speaks Kazakh, Russian, Turkish, English, Arabic, and Portuguese. She enjoys creating Arabic calligraphy and studying astronomy. She is currently a graduate student at Harvard University and in the future she hopes to have a hand in improving Kazakhstan’s educational system.

Marlin Lum is an artist, award-winning photographer, technology specialist and also a vital part of Cultural Heritage Imaging (C.H.I.), a non-profit that presents unique imaging archiving to museums, including to date the Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum in New York. UCLA’s collections as well as museums and monastery collections in Lausanne and Bourg-St-Pierre (both  in Switzerland) and other institutions around the world. C.H.I. is a partner with Princeton University in a major National Science Foundation grant to preserve cultural heritage through digital and other photographic data and metadata.

Mike Newell is the award-winning film director of over 75 major feature films, including Enchanted April, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Awakening, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Man in the Iron Mask, Dance With a Stranger, Into the West, Donnie Brasco, Pushing Tin, Mona Lisa Smile, Love in the Time of Cholera as well as The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Mike graduated from Cambridge University and has an honorary doctorate (Doctor of Arts) from University of Herfortshire. His many award venues include the Cannes Film Festival and the London Critics Circle Film Awards, among others.

Andrew Phillips is a recent Classics graduate from Stanford University and a varsity starting offensive lineman on the nationally-ranked Stanford University Football team. Awarded by his teammates as most inspirational player, he is a budding Shakespeare scholar. Despite his huge stature, he owns perhaps the world’s most miniature copy of The Tempest (1” across). The editors vouch that Andrew quotes regularly from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Thucydides on Pericles. Andrew is a candidate for his M.S. degree from University of Virginia in 2012.

Brianna Rego has been published in Scientific American with a January 2011 article “Radioactive Smoke” on polonium 210 poisoning in tobacco as highbrow investigative journalism. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in History of Science at Stanford University. Testing her appetite for archaeological research in 2005 in the humid jungles of the Maya world in her place of birth (Guatemala), she also honed an appetite for wry narrative while swatting insects and enduring the dirt and sweat of fieldwork.

Michael Shanks, Archaeologist, is Hoskins Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, Director of Stanford University’s Humanities Lab and Co-Director of the Binchester Archaeology Project, also having excavated in Greece, Sicily and elsewhere around the world. Shanks is one of the world’s most influential archaeologists, an inventor of postprocessual theory according to the World Archaeological Congress. Author of many pioneering books and publications, his Cambridge University Ph.D. was followed by a Docentur (Sc.D.) from University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Santana Shorty is a student at Stanford University from the Navajo Nation. She is following the Stanford Structured Liberal Education (SLE) rigorous Humanities track. She is currently studying her native language and oral traditions. She enjoys wearing ridiculously large turquoise earrings and eating New Mexico red chile. She is also fiercely passionate about human rights and justice.

P. F. Sommerfeldt lived in London for years, working in antiques and art as well as interior design. She studied at the University of London, including coursework with the National Gallery’s Ashok Roy on pigment analysis and also at Christie’s at South Kensington. She currently travels several months a year in Europe where she is on the lookout for antique furniture for her clients.

A. C. Williams is a writer based in the St. Gallen Canton of  Switzerland. She received her education at Mount Holyoke College (B.A., Magna cum laude) and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (M.A. with Dissertation Distinction).  She has published poetry in the Sand Hill Review (2008) and is working on book manuscripts in progress, including about her amusing literary childhood in London.

Danny Wood is an Australian journalist, having written for the BBC in Europe for several years, particularly Spain. He covered controversies for the BBC (“Spanish Civil War Bodies Exhumed”), (“Spanish Winemakers Fight Climate Change”), as well as on European art (“Spain Gallery Casts Doubt on Goya”) and art restoration needs (“Thomas Becket Paintings Uncovered in Spain”). In 2010 his popular BBC 4 production was “On Hannibal’s Trail”, cycling with his brothers in 2009 from Spain to South Italy. He has also been a radio show host in the San Francisco Bay Area.