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MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences - Great Ideas Change the World

Associate Dean Kai von Fintel 

Kai von Fintel, Associate Dean of the School, and Professor of Linguistics



Overseeing the Educational Mission of the School
The Associate Dean of the School, Kai von Fintel, oversees the educational mission of the School. He chairs the HASS Overview Committee, which has oversight of the HASS Requirement and the CI-H Requirement. He supervises the HASS Education Office, which helps all MIT undergraduates navigate their education in humanities, arts, and social sciences. He administers the SHASS Fund for Teaching and Learning, a fund that fosters the development of exciting new undergraduate classes in the School. He represents the School on several Institute committees.

Professor of Linguistics
Kai is a professor of linguistics in MIT's Department of Linguistics & Philosophy, where his research bridges the linguistics and philosophy sections. He works on semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and the intersections thereof.

Born and raised in Germany, Kai was an undergraduate at the University of Münster, Cambridge University, and the University of Cologne, and received his PhD in 1994 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has taught at MIT ever since. Before serving as the Associate Dean, he chaired MIT's Committee on Academic Performance.

Committed to the Free Flow of Scientific Communication
Kai is deeply committed to the free flow of scientific communication. He has published "Semantics etc.," an academic blog on semantics, etc. since 2003. He is co-editor of the fledgling open-access journal "Semantics and Pragmatics," and contributed to the recent decision by the MIT Faculty to grant open access to all research articles written by MIT Faculty.  

Cohousing, Hiking, Computer Geekery...
Kai lives in the Sawyer Hill Eco-Village cohousing community with his wife, San Tunstall, a software engineer at Akamai, and their children Emma and Pascal. He volunteers as a youth soccer coach and enjoys running (three half-marathons in the last two years), hiking, computer geekery, reading, and cooking.

Visit Kai's website for publication information and to read his blog.