ELECTRUM MAGAZINE STAFF  2010-2024

Patrick Hunt  Editor-in-Chief

Catherine Clover  Asia Editor and Staff Writer

Andrea Galdy  Europe Editor, Museum and Exhibition Review Editor

Nikki Goddard, Wine and Food Editor

Melissa Guertin  Book Review Editor

Brianna Rego Lind  History of Science Editor

Marlin Lum  Technical and Design Editor

Will Lynes  Tech Support and Website Manager

Gina Granados Palmer  Associate Editor

Andrew Phillips  Editorial Assistant

Allison Rath  Staff Writer

Santana Shorty  Editorial Assistant

P. F. Sommerfeldt  Business Manager and Staff Writer

Jess Taylor Director Digital Strategy & Technology

A. C. Williams Staff Writer

CONTRIBUTORS FOR ISSUES 2010 to date:

Bianca Caprice Aguirre  graduated from Stanford University with her B.A. in 2014, having majored in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. Subsequently she finished her MA in Education at Stanford in 2015.. 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.

Adrian Arima received his B.A. in Economics and M.S. in Operations Research from Stanford University, and obtained his law degree (J.D.) from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a retired healthcare lawyer. He has been the attorney for Stanford Healthcare and held senior legal positions at several biopharmaceutical companies.

Cher Stone Beall  graduated from Arizona State University with a B.A. in Art History followed by Harvard postgraduate design courses. She is an A.S.I.D. award-winning professional interior designer in Newport Beach, California, whose keen interest in ancient architectural and garden history and their applications to modern design have been stimulated by Stanford postgraduate courses in the Mediterranean world, particularly on Pompeii. She is a graduate student in the Stanford M.L.A. (Masters of Liberal Arts) Program.

Walter Borden, M.D. is a forensic clinical psychiatrist in Connecticut whose highly esteemed work on connecting past and present mental health praxes is also published in venues such as the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law (2011) in compelling articles such as “Classically Insane”.  His M.D. is from New York University School of Medicine and he is also authoring a forthcoming book on ancient and modern links of psychiatry as seen through Greek literature of Aeschylus and his legacy. Dr. Borden could easily show how closely Freud also read Sophokles’ Oedipus Rex.

Pauline Chakmakjian is the author of The Sphinxing Rabbit trilogy published by Markosia and an independent lecturer on a variety of subjects related to the areas of entrepreneurship, history, arts, culture and Japan.  She is particularly fascinated by topics related to individuality, freedom, happiness, polymathy and decentralization.  Her presentations take the form of one-hour lectures, study days and short courses for private member societies, cruises, corporate entertainment, private homes, universities, charities and other related organizations including lecture tours in Australia and New Zealand.  She holds a BA in English Literature (USA) during which she was also awarded a Merit Scholarship in Fine Art (drawing and painting), a Diploma in Law (London), an MA in Modern French Studies (London) and is a member of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple.  Pauline was elected onto the Board of the Japan Society of the United Kingdom from 2008-2014 and the Japan Society of Hawaii from 2015-2017.  In 2014, Pauline was appointed a Visit Kyoto Ambassador by the Mayor of the City of Kyoto.   In 2018, she became a Freeman of the City of London.

Anthony Cline is a partner at Latham & Watkins, with a focus on technology and intellectual property transactions.  He graduated with a B.A. in the History and Literature of England from Harvard and received his J.D. at the UCLA School of Law, and currently a postgraduate student at Stanford.

Catherine Clover is our Asia Editor and a writer / novelist currently living in Thailand. Her D.Phil. is from Oxford University in Historical Medieval Architecture 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. She is also on the Board of the Neilson Hays Library, Bangkok.

Timothy J. Demy is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College (Newport, RI) and retired Navy chaplain. He is a graduate of the University of Cambridge with a MSt in international relations. Elsewhere, he earned a doctorate in historical theology and also in technology and the humanities. The author and editor of numerous books and articles, he is an avid bibliophile, classical music lover, and student of piano.

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 graduated from Stanford University with his B.A. in 2013, having majored in Classics and French. Now 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, UK.

Andrea Galdy, our Europe Editor and Museum and Exhibition Review Editor is an Art Historian and academic, having taught for university programs in London, Florence and Trier. She has lectured at many universities including Stanford. Her extensive published scholarship has a particular focus on antiquarian interests and especially the collections of Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence. Her publications can be found in the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts, Florenz, the University of Warwick Renaissance Journal and multiple articles in the Wiley Renaissance Studies, among others.  She was a Melville J. Kahn Fellow, Villa I Tatti – Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and she was one of the editors of the The Pouncey Index of Baldinucci’s Notizie, Centro Di, Florence, 2005. Her Ph.D. is from the University of Manchester, UK; she is a Fellow of The Royal Historical Society.

Ismayil Garacar graduated from Stanford University with an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and has been an innovator in diagnostic medical ultrasound imaging technologies for 35 years. When not traveling to explore the ruins and artifacts of ancient civilizations he is reading and participating in postgraduate courses to learn more about ancient history and technology.

James Geary, best-selling author, has written 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 and his newest book Wit’s End. He is also 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, where is also now also Deputy Curator at the Nieman Foundation, Harvard. He is based in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nikki Goddard, educated at Cornell University (B.A./B.S.) is a Northern California wine writer and educator with a professional WSET Level 4 Diploma (Wine and Spirit Education Trust) and a wine educator at Discover Wine & Spirits Academy where she teaches wine education to professionals studying for WSET certification, as well as writing for various publications (Wine.com, Edible East Bay, BIN Magazine). Earlier she co-founded a wine bar in San Francisco (The Barrel Room) although since moved on, Nikki got her start in the Riesling-rich wine region of New York’s Finger Lakes and now works with Wine.com. The editors of Electrum Magazine are so impressed with her writing that we expect her to be soon writing best-selling wine and gastronomic detective novels. Nikki is Electrum Magazine‘s Wine and Food Editor.

Chelsea Glickman is a graduate student in Education at Stanford University (M.A. Candidate) and earned her B.A from the University of California, Berkeley, in History of Art. She is also in the Stanford STEP Program for Teacher Education. Her undergraduate honors thesis connecting antiquity to surrealism received the Andrew Stewart Award from the U. C. Berkeley History of Art Department in 2020.

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 B.A. degree in art history from Santa Clara University; she has also been a postgraduate student at Stanford University and graduated from USC with an M.A. in Heritage Conservation.

Garth Hall, originally from South Africa, is trained in civil engineering, with his B.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, followed by a M.S engineering degree from Stanford University in Water Resource Planning and his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering also from the University of the Witwatersrand of South Africa. He also earned his M.S. in Management Science from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was a Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.  Garth has had a lifelong keen interest in stone tools growing up in South Africa and has long followed stone traditions there from several million years ago through to the human migrations out of Africa. Garth also takes postgraduate courses in archaeology at Stanford.

LiHe Han  graduated with her B.A. from Stanford University majoring in Philosophy and French in 2013. 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 edited book forthcoming in The Illustrated Gallic Wars.

Andrew Herkovic is recently retired Director of Communications and Development at Stanford University Library (ASUL), and has also been 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 B.A. degree in Anthropology.

Susanne Houfek earned her B.A. in French from Stanford University and her M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. After a successful career in San Francisco working for Fortune 500 firms in product management and marketing in the first chapter of her life, in her second chapter she became a consultant to emerging companies with clients nationwide and international. In her third chapter she became a world traveler, published writer and photographer to complement solo performances on soprano ukulele. Her recent academic travel includes visiting exotic places with Stanford Alumni Organization, to Classical sites like Cyrene and Sabratha in Libya, for example, as well as following the pilgrim route walking to Santiago de Compostela on the Camino of St. James. She continues taking Stanford postgraduate courses.

Patrick Hunt, Editor-in-Chief, is an archaeologist, historian and author of twenty-five books, including the best seller, (Penguin Group Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History, 2007, published in five languages, and Hannibal, 2017, from Simon and Schuster, also published in five languages). He 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, and he has many articles and entries published in journals, reference books and encyclopedias, including at least ten entries published in Encyclopaedia Britannica. He appears frequently in documentaries on PBS, National Geographic Explorer TV, NOVA, Discovery 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 from 2009-22. 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. He is also a National Geographic Expeditions Expert, an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an elected Fellow of the Explorers Club, New York.

Katherine Joplin graduated with her B.A. from Stanford University in 2014, having majored in English with Creative Writing concentration as well as Japanese. While at Stanford she identified 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.

John Leonard, Ph.D., is an archaeologist and historian of Greece as well as a journalist based in Athens, Greece. He is a regular featured contributor to Greece Is (greece-is.com) and he also teaches languages and on Ancient Athens for various academic and related programs in Greece as well as being an editor and translator for various venues. 

Hilary Letwin holds a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University in Art History after her double honors BA in Classics and Classical Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College and her MA at the Warburg Institute, University of London. She was also awarded a Bromberg Fellowship at the British Museum. In addition to articles in the Print Quarterly and co-editing an art history volume on the Pouncey Index of Baldinucci’s Notizie in Florence, her recent publications include Saints, Sinners and Souvenirs: Italian Masterworks on Paper and Talk of the Town: Molly Lamb Boback. She works as Acting Director and Curator at the West Vancouver Art Museum, Canada.

Marlin Lum, our Technical Editor, 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.

Will Lynes has a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and 14 years of experience in the tech industry on both East Coast (New York City) and West Coast (Silicon Valley and San Francisco).

Malia Maxwell is a writer from Seattle, Washington. Her chapbook, Daisy Crown, was published through the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance in 2016. She is currently pursuing her undergraduate degree from Stanford University and pining for some rain and gloomy weather.

Doug McElwain has a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Stanford University ’72 followed by an M.B.A. also from Stanford ’77. His U.S. Navy line officer time included stints in signals division and then running the OI for the Combat Information Center; he then worked at Hewlett Packard in finance and later managed an IT group developing software. He now lives in Santa Barbara where he is a docent at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and writes about artists as well as elsewhere on ancient technology. He loves science fiction and ancient engineering.

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.

Leanne Ogasawara has worked as a translator from the Japanese for over twenty years. Her translation work has included academic translation, poetry, philosophy, and documentary film. She has published in various journals including Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy and her creative writing has appeared in Hedgehog Review, Kyoto Journal, River Teeth/Beautiful Things, the Dublin Review of Books, Pleiades Magazine, and the Pasadena Star newspaper. She also has a monthly column at the science and arts blog 3 Quarks Daily. In 2020, she was awarded the Calvino Prize in creative writing.

Gina Granados Palmer, our Associate Editor, is an artist with broad-ranging interests in technology, film, literature, and art history. She graduated from California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Opisbo, with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and Harvard University (HES) with an A.L.M. in International Relations. She is currently completing het Ph.D. in Humanities and Technology from Salve Regina University (Newport, R.I.). The focus of her dissertation is memory and meaning in the nuclear era.  She is the co-editor and co-author of several forthcoming works dealing with leadership and war studies and is a global traveler passionate about applying history and the humanities to present-day concerns through emerging technologies.

Andrew Phillips graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Classics in 2011 and was a varsity starting offensive lineman on his era’s 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 inch across). The editors vouch that Andrew quotes regularly from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Thucydides on Pericles. Andrew also received his M.S. degree from University of Virginia in 2012.

Allison Rath graduated from Stanford University in 2014 with her B.A. in International Relations and Art and also wrote for the Stanford Daily. A gifted linguist in Russian, Italian and Mandarin Chinese, she was an intern reporter on assignment for the Moscow Times in 2011 and plans on graduate study in Britain in 2014 pursuing some level of cultural diplomacy. She also teaches art classes in Mandarin Chinese and is tickled to have recently passed the challenging U.S. Foreign Service Exam.

Brianna Rego (Lind) has been published in Scientific American with a January 2011 article “Radioactive Smoke” on polonium 210 poisoning in tobacco as highbrow investigative journalism. She received her Ph.D. 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.

Jeff Richardson graduated from CalTech (BS, 1970) and Stanford (PhD, 1974), majoring in chemistry. He worked at Lawrence Livermore National Lab for 35 years on a variety of national and international security programs. More recently he was a Visiting Scholar (2009-2011), then (and currently) Affiliate at Stanford’s CISAC (Center for International Security and Cooperation). Jeff worked for CRDF (2016-2019) as a science advisor to the U.S. State Dept for international security programs. Jeff has been a runner since college, completed the Athens Marathon in 2005, and still runs monthly 10Ks. He sails regularly on San Francisco Bay, and skippered a chartered sailboat from Piraeus to Nauplion (Nafplio) for a 2 week cruise in 2015.

John Roman has been teaching illustration and perspective at Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 1993. He is the author of The Art of Illustrated Maps (Simon & Schuster / HOW Books, 2015) and 50 Markets of Illustration (Simon & Schuster / HOW Books, 2014). He is also a regular contributor to Artists Magazine (1991-present) and has written for Communication Arts, Drawing, Print and Professional Artist magazines. Roman’s literary essays have appeared in The Out of Line Journal, The Bungalore Review and The Concord Saunterer. 

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 post-processual 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 graduated from Stanford University with her B.A. in 2014 and is from the Navajo Nation. A gifted singer of Navajo songs and deep on folklore, she followed the Stanford Humanities track. She is currently studying her native language and oral traditions and could intimately teach Southwest History. She enjoys wearing ridiculously large turquoise earrings and eating New Mexico red chile. She is also fiercely passionate about human rights and justice. She would make a great ambassador from the U.S. to anywhere.

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 in art history. She currently travels several months a year in Europe where she is perennially on the lookout for art and antique furniture for her clients.

S. David Spain is a professional engineer who earned his B.S., M.A. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. He regularly also takes postgraduate courses at Stanford University and is a devotee of excellent French wine.

Jess Taylor is a technologist, scientist, ceramicist and life-long student of the Greek and Roman civilizations. He earned his BA and MS in Geophysics, emphasizing seismology, from the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara, respectively, and his MBA from the University of Southern California. Since his early years, Jess has traveled often to Greece and Italy, and lived in Italy for 5 years working in science and technology. In 2013 Jess founded Blue Rocket, a company dedicated to the design and development of mobile applications. Presently he is working to merge his interests in science, technology, ceramics and the Classics, and he also takes postgraduate courses at Stanford University.  

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.

Alice Devine Wilson graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with her B.A. in Economics and is a graduate student at Stanford University’s M.L.A. program. She worked as the leasing director for commercial real estate developer William Wilson & Associates (no relation), known for their innovative buildings and public art. She has authored over thirty professional articles on the real estate industry. She is a trained School Guide Docent for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and enjoys the outdoors, including hiking the Tahoe Rim Trail and swimming the annual Trans Tahoe Relay and takes postgraduate courses at Stanford University.

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.

Emmanuel Zilber has been our youngest contributor to date, submitting his 2018 article from Berlin, Germany while a senior at Harvard Westlake School, where he was a two-time International History Olympiad, competing in academic quiz bowl competitions worldwide. A political activist, he volunteers in political campaigns and advocates for Criminal Justice Reform, most recently working for the Reform  Jails initiative. His blog has been active in politics and international relations (http://www.politicswithperspective.blogspot.com) since 2010. He has been a member of the Los Angeles Global Affairs Council and a founding UNICEF Young Ambassador. He is now a student at the University of Chicago, finishing his undergraduate degree.