I hold a Ph.D. in Physics from the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics, Rio de Janeiro, in 1991, with a dissertation on theoretical applications of Goedel's theorem in physics, under the advisement of Francisco Antonio Doria and Newton da Costa. After my Ph.D., I spent three years as a researcher at the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences, Stanford University.
I've been teaching at State for over fifteen years. My courses focus on 20th century U.S. popular culture and history, with special interest in American Cities and California. Right now, I am completing my second book, Not a Lost Generation: The Great War Veterans Who Transformed American Popular Culture.
Steve Savage balances his work as an educator, author and recordist. Savage is an active producer and recording engineer and has been the primary engineer on 7 records that received Grammy nominations. Savage holds a Ph.D. in cultural musicology. His book Bytes & Backbeats: Repurposing Music in the Digital Age from The University of Michigan Press uses personal recording ethnologies to reflect and comment on the evolution of musical genre and the cultural impact of sound reproduction technologies.
I'm a professor in the Humanities program (now part of the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies, of which I am currently Director), where I teach undergraduate and graduate courses focusing on American culture, music and society; literary and musical modernisms; literary and cultural theory. I recently spent 18 months in Ghana, teaching American literature and studying West African literature and culture. I am currently developing courses that are comparative not only in bringing American and W.
Peter Richardson has written critically acclaimed books about Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and radical author and editor Carey McWilliams. His essays have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Los Angeles Times Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, California, Guernica, California History, and many other outlets.
San Francisco Bay Area native actively researching local and California history, literature, art, architecture, natural history, the mind, the brain, theories of everything, and postmodern skepticism. Join me at the banquet of rational thought and creative expression; in the dance of the material and mystical; through the kaleidoscope of perception; to understanding and compassion for the self and society. And just a little snark.
I received my B. A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956, with a double major in Philosophy and English Literature. During my first year of graduate study in Philosophy at UCB, my interests increasingly focused on the relationship of ideas to one another and to their historical and cultural contexts, and I entered the newly-formed History of Ideas Program at Brandeis University. I was awarded my Ph.D. in the History of Ideas in Spring, 1963, and have been teaching in the interdisciplinary Humanities Department at San Francisco State University since Fall, 1962.
