Alexander Nemerov named 2025 Baccalaureate speaker
Alexander Nemerov, art and art history professor and scholar of American culture, was named the keynote speaker for the 2025 Baccalaureate ceremonies, which will take place on June 14.
An annual student-led celebration hosted by the Office for Religious & Spiritual Life (ORSL), Baccalaureate is a ceremony prior to commencement that features “readings, prayers, and music reflecting the wide range of religious traditions in the Stanford community,” wrote the Stanford Report.
“I was surprised and really honored [to have been chosen],” Nemerov said. “What an extraordinary invitation, and I’m thrilled to accept it.”
Nemerov received a B.A. in art history and English from the University of Vermont and a Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. He worked as a professor at Stanford and Yale, starting his career at Stanford in 1992 and moving to Yale in 2001. He briefly served as chair of Yale’s department of history of art before returning to Stanford in 2012 as the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities.
At the National Gallery of Art, Nemerov was the first scholar to give the Andrew W. Mellon Lecture with a focus on American art and also delivered the Andrew Wyeth Lecture. Most recently, Nemerov published The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, his 11th book.
Despite his accolades, one of the things Nemerov said he values most about teaching is “how much [he] can learn from [his students].”
“I’ve been able to teach long enough to learn how to teach in such a way that it’s a reciprocal thing,” Nemerov said. “It involves what we all share, the questions that move us and shape us, which I think often are sensed and maybe even acknowledged but not really dealt with or addressed in our daily life here.”
Tiffany Steinwert, the dean for Religious and Spiritual Life, highlighted Nemerov’s use of art “as a lens for understanding our past and our place in the world” in a statement to the Stanford Report.
“As our Baccalaureate speaker, he will inspire our graduates to envision their futures at life’s crossroads, far beyond Stanford, where they can carry forward a shared sense of ethics, compassion, and responsibility and make a meaningful difference in their communities and beyond,” Steinwert said.
2025 senior class presidents Jason Chen Lin ’25, Danny Mottesi ’25, Shreya Ramachandran ’25 and Blaine Wells ’25 told the Stanford Report that they appreciated Nemerov’s “reflections on history as a vibrant, living dialogue” as qualities that would serve to make him an “exemplary speaker.”
The ORSL is also conducting a contest to choose a member of the Class of 2025 to address their classmates at Baccalaureate.
Baccalaureate will begin at 10 a.m. on Saturday, June 14 in Frost Amphitheater. Olympian Katie Ledecky ’20 will deliver the Commencement address in Stanford Stadium on Sunday, June 15.
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