Supporting research opportunities across the world

MIT’s Global Seed Funds (GSF) have enabled faculty from across the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) to connect with colleagues abroad on a variety of projects.

GSF, administered by the Center for International Studies, has awarded over $24 million to over 1,300 faculty research projects since its inception in 2008, including many projects initiated by SHASS faculty. GSF includes a general fund and several country-specific funds. 

“Global Seed Funds help MIT faculty create exciting new connections with colleagues abroad,” said Justin Leahey, assistant director for Global Seed Funds.

GSF supports open, early-stage collaborations with researchers at academic universities and public research institutions globally. Award amounts are typically around $25,000.

SHASS recipients have collaborated on a range of research projects, like investigating how digital tools married to archival documents can help historians investigate and understand the complexities of historical eras.

 The “Novel Digital History” project, made possible by a MISTI Czech Republic Seed Grant, was led by Kurt Fendt, senior lecturer emeritus in Comparative Media Studies/Writing.

The project investigated how a digital platform might support historians in researching the complexities of a historical era. It featured a collaboration between scholars from MIT, the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the Faculty of Humanities at Prague’s Charles University. 

GSF also helped support Eden Medina, associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, in her work on the museum exhibition “How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design” which opened in 2023 at the Centro Cultural La Moneda, the cultural center of the Chilean presidential palace. 

Medina collaborated with MIT students and Chilean partners for the exhibition marking 50 years since the Allende presidency.

“It has really been a collective effort to bring this history to the Chilean public and also to a larger international public,” Medina said about the project in a piece on MIT News.

Other SHASS awardees include:

Political Science professor Adam Berinsky, who worked with Antonio Alonso Arechar from the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Economic on the project

History professor Tanalis Padilla, who worked with Irma Erendira Sandoval Ballesteros of the National Autonomous University of Mexico on the project “Digitizing and Archiving the Murals of Mexico’s Rural Normal Schools.”

History professor Emma Teng, who worked with Rachel Leow of the University of Cambridge on the project “Re-Framing Asian Migration and Diasporas.”