Silicon Valley Leaders to Present at Unprecedented Technology and Humanities ConferenceStanford President John L. Hennessy will open a conference where leading executives and venture capitalists will discuss the ways in which highly trained and creative humanities doctoral students can play integral roles in Silicon Valley businesses.
BiblioTech BiblioTech’s inaugural conference is an ambitious effort to bring together key thought leaders from Silicon Valley and Stanford University to open an energetic and timely dialogue on the ways in which talented and creative Stanford humanist Ph.D.s can bring new vision and skills to the industries of Silicon Valley and how Silicon Valley can benefit from this talent pool. Stanford University’s commitment to blending excellence in the humanities and sciences and its longstanding contribution to Silicon Valley’s innovative culture make it the ideal place to launch this wide-ranging conversation. Vivek Ranadivé, Chairman and CEO of TIBCO, will give the opening keynote talk entitled, “How the Right Brain Helped Me Make a Billion, Win a Basketball Game, and Land This Gig,” and June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED Media, will close the day with her talk, “The Story Behind ‘TED: Ideas Worth Spreading.’” Conference presentations by: • Patrick Byrne, Chairman and CEO, Overstock.com, on “Bringing Humanities Ph.D. Innovation to Silicon Valley: The Case for Humanities Ph.D.s” • Marissa Mayer, Vice President Consumer Products, Google, on “Silicon Valley Entry Points for Humanities Ph.D.s: Google, Social Media, Marketing, Product Design, and More” • John Hagel III, Co-Chairman Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, on “The Power of Pull” • Damon Horowitz, In-House Philosopher and Director of Engineering, Google, on “Why You Should Quit Your Technology Job and Get a Humanities Ph.D.” • Michael Moritz, Managing Partner, Sequoia Capital, on “Future Ventures: Making the Leap from a Humanities Ph.D. to Silicon Valley” Each talk will be followed by a panel discussion with Stanford humanities scholars that will extend and develop the ideas presented in the address. BiblioTech is founded on the core belief that the creativity and analytical acuity found in humanities innovation and technological innovation can be combined in powerful and productive ways. Anaïs Saint-Jude, Conference Organizer, spoke of her vision for BiblioTech. “We want to raise awareness at a high level that today’s humanities Ph.D. is a professional degree that prepares students exceedingly well for both academia and industry,” said Saint-Jude. “We want to dispel the myth that a humanities Ph.D. only leads to the career of professor. While that may have been more or less the case fifty years ago, it is no longer true today.” “We have been delighted and encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive response to the conference that we have received from Silicon Valley executive officers and venture capitalists,” “Today’s humanities Ph.D. furthers his or her study of his or her core discipline (i.e. literature, philosophy, classics, or history, to name a few) while continuing to take classes in related disciplines that help to situate his or her core study in a much larger context. In this sense,” said Saint-Jude, “Ph.D. students are intellectual entrepreneurs who look at the landscape of ideas both in depth and across disciplines in order to discover new ways of analyzing a problem and thereby create new scholarship.” Saint-Jude hopes the conference will make a positive and productive contribution to the larger conversation about the future of humanities education. “Ultimately, this conference is about much more than placing Ph.D. students in industry positions, though undeniably that is a vital objective. My hope is that the conference will create a ripple effect that will help to revitalize humanities education in this country by leading to more faculty positions, more students majoring in the humanities, more collaboration across disciplines, and more innovation.” LIVESTREAM BiblioTech will be streamed live on May 11, 2011. Click here for details: http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/ TICKETS The conference is free and open to the public but advance registration is required. Reservations can be made here: http://www.stanfordtickets.org/ EVENT WEBSITE http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/ BiblioTech: Bringing Humanities Ph.D. Innovation to Silicon Valley is a first annual conference organized by Anaïs Saint- Jude with the help of Stanford Professor of Comparative Literature David Palumbo-Liu and the support of Stanford University President John L. Hennessy. Conference sponsors include the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education, the School of Humanities and Sciences, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Department of English, the Department of History, the Department of Philosophy, the Stanford Language Center, the Stanford Career Development Center, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Human Experience at Stanford University. If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Anaïs Saint-Jude or David Palumbo-Liu, please call Anaïs at 650-575-7402 or email Anaïs at anais@stanfordalumni.org. # # # Located between San Francisco and San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University is recognized as one of the world's leading research and teaching institutions. Photo: https://www.prlog.org/ End
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