SHASS announces four Research Fund recipients for 2023

The SHASS Research Fund supports MIT research in the humanities, arts, or social sciences that shows promise of making an important contribution to the proposed area of activity.

Congratulations to the 2023 Recipients

Volha Charnysh | Assistant Professor, Political Science
Charnysh plans to apply her funding to participate in a program from the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. The twelve-week curriculum is designed to develop and improve faculty research practices and to help achieve publication goals.
Volha Charnysh's website

Marjoleine Kars | Adjunct Professor, History
The SHASS Research Fund will enable Kars to make a research trip to Suriname this spring, continuing work on her ongoing book project. The book, Multiple Crossings: The Lives of Two African Men in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Atlantic, is a biography of two itinerant African men who were caught up in Dutch slavery and colonialism during the Age of Revolution (1760-c. 1820).
Marjoleine Kars's website

Eden Medina | Associate Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society
Medina will apply her funding toward a book project, How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design, which examines the role of graphic and industrial design during the government of Chilean president Salvador Allende (1979-73). The book's publication will coincide with an associated exhibition at the Centro Cultural La Moneda in Santiago, Chile and with the fifieth anniversary of the the military coup that brought an abrupt end to Chilean democracy.
Eden Medina's website

Ken Urban | Senior Lecturer, Music and Theater Arts
This funding will support the development of Urban's new multimedia play The Moderate with dirctor and designer Jared Mezzocchi. The play explores questions around questions of content moderation and online violence, which Urban spent a year researching for the project.
Ken Urban's website