Said and Done

February 2015 Edition
Published by the Office of the Dean
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
 


 


 
QUOTABLE

               

              “My research interests all center around the question of how
               relatively powerless people with not a lot of resources are able
               to get people in power to provide things they are supposed to."
          

                           — Lily Tsai, Associate Professor of Political Science,
                              and recipient of the 2015 Levitan Award

                 


 


HONORS AND AWARDS

 

Llily Tsai receives Levitan Award, the School's highest research honor
Tsai, Associate Professor of Political Science, has received the Levitan Award to support research on the health, economic, and socio-political outcomes of Ebola outreach work in Liberia. Tsai's Levitan proposal was cited as "technically feasible, and morally and politically significant."
Story



L to R: Lily Tsai, Associate Professor of Political Science; view of Monrovia, Liberia, one site of
Tsai's current research


 

COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES / WRITING
Vivek Bald wins two "best book" awards for Bengali Harlem
Bald has received the 2015 Outstanding History Book Prize
from the Association of Asian American Studies for Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013). The book also received the 2014 Saloutos Book Prize, for best book on US immigration history. Bengali Harlem will be issued in paperback this month. 
More | Vivek Bald website | About Bengali Harlem | Lost Histories website


COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES / WRITING
BBC culture critics name The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz best novel of the early 21st Century
Story | MIT students on having Junot Díaz as their writing professor


LINGUISTICS
Michel DeGraff receives MIT's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award
DeGraff, Professor of Linguistics, is a leader of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, a project for the development, evaluation, and dissemination of active-learning resources in Kreyòl to help improve education, leadership, and management in Haiti.
Story | Video: STEM in Kreyòl with Kalfou Richès artists

 



L to R: Vivek Bald, Assoc Professor of Writing & Digital Media; cover, Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Junot Díaz, Rudge & Nancy Allen Professor of Writing; Michel DeGraff, Professor of Linguistics




PROFILE | KAI VON FINTEL


Decoding the Meaning of Language
"Linguistics is basically the science of language. You use a scientific approach, but you get to apply it to something central to humanity. We put these signals in the world and others can read our mind to some extent. I find that a baffling phenomenon — why not try to figure that out?"
Story by SHASS Communications
 



Kai von Fintel, Professor of Linguistics; and Associate Dean, MIT SHASS




FEATURE | EDUCATION INNOVATION


FLIPPED CLASSROOMS IN THE HUMANITIES
The Holy Grail of Teaching: Actively Engaged Students
The humanities have been flipping the classroom and practicing active learning for decades. Consider the lively classroom of MIT Literaure Professor Arthur Bahr.
Story at MIT OpenCourseWare


POLITICAL SCIENCE + EECS
Political Science and EECS join forces for "Elections and Voting Technology" course
Joint course prepares MIT students to meet the complex challenges of modern electoral systems.
Story by SHASS Communications
 

 


                                                                                    Image: MIT SHASS Communications



RESEARCH


Research Portfolio 
Research is the engine for the School's capacity to help meet the world's great challenges. To name just a few areas of impact, MIT SHASS research helps alleviate poverty, safeguard elections, steer economies, understand the past and present, generate wise approaches to health, environment, water, and energy challenges, inform effective policy, assess the impact of new technologies, understand human language, and create new forms at the juncture of art and science.
Research Portfolio


COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES / WRITING
When logic meets rhetoric | Edward Schiappa
Schiappa, the John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities, and Head of CMS/W, has studied reason and rhetoric from ancient Greece to “Will & Grace.” Schippa explains that issues first studied in ancient rhetoric — between language and thought, and the role of reasoned speech in collective decision-making — remain central in today's communication studies. "So for me," he says, "there was never a disconnect between the study of classical and contemporary rhetorical theory.”
Story at MIT News by Peter Dizikes


DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS
J-PAL study leads Indian state of Gujarat to adopt environmental reforms
Environmental authorities in the Indian state of Gujarat reformed their environmental auditing system this month based on findings from a large-scale study conducted in partnership with economists at MIT, Harvard, University of Chicago, and Yale. The study showed that better auditing leads to lower pollution levels. 
Story
 

ECONOMICS
Is the medical match fair?
Study finds the demand for positions strongly influences medical residents’ salaries.
Story at MIT News by Peter Dizikes
 


L to R: Edward Schiappa, Burchard Professor of Humanities, and Head, CMS/W; environmental
auditing in Gujara, India; Nikhil Argawal, Assistant Professor of Economics


 

ART, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY
MIT CAST Symposium investigates the senses
Artists, scientists, technologists, humanities scholars, and practioners joined in a recent two-day event that highlighted intriguing intersections bewteen arts and science disciplines.
Story by Arts at MIT


PHILOSOPHY
Does time pass? Prepare to rethink. | Brad Skow
In MIT philosopher Brad Skow's analysis "events do not sail past us and vanish forever; they just exist in different parts of spacetime." Skow’s view of time leads him to some startling conclusions: for instance, the idea that we are not located at a single time, but are "spread out in time, something like the way you’re spread out in space."
Story at MIT News by Peter Dizikes
 


                                                                                       Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT News


 

ECONOMICS
Financial Aid Drives 4-Year Enrollment, Persistence | Angrist, Autor, Hudson, Pallais
A study by co-authored by a team of MIT economists finds that “the effects of [financial] aid in encouraging enrollment and boosting persistence were especially pronounced among nonwhite students and students with lower grade point averages and standardized test scores."
Story | Download abstract


Bookshelf
The research of MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences appears principally in the form of books and publications, and music and theater productions. These gems of the School provide new knowledge and analysis, innovation and insight, guidance for policy, and nourishment for lives.
Take a look
 

 



COMMUNITY


A lasting legacy | Anthropologist Jean Jackson retires
Jackson joined the MIT faculty in 1972, an early member of a newly formed program. Now, upon her retirement this year, the department’s nine members are a strong and tight-knit community — much to Jackson’s credit, say her colleagues.
More 

 

Jay Scheib, Director of MIT Theater Arts, named housemaster for Senior House
“I have always been drawn to Senior House,” says Scheib. "I share very deeply the Senior House students' independent spirit, their daring inventiveness, and especially their social values. It’s an honor and a privilege to be welcomed into the community.”
Story | Jay Scheib MIT webpage


Irving Singer, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, dies at 89
A dedicated professor, writer, and longtime member of the MIT philosophy community, Singer had an academic career that spanned 65 years — with over half a century as a professor at MIT. 
Article at MIT News  | MIT Press: the Irving Singer Library
 

 


L to R: Jean Jackson, Professor of Anthropology emeritus; Jay Scheib, Associate Professor of Theater Arts; the late Irving Singer, Professor of Philosophy emeritus




IN THE MEDIA

 

SCIENCE WRITING AND PUBLIC HEALTH
Seth Mnookin helps advance public health, understanding of vaccination
In response to the recent resurgence of measles in the US, Mnookin, Assistant Professor of Science Writing, and author of The Panic Virus, has been called on frequently by national media to help advance public understanding of vaccination. Here follows a sampling of Mnookin's contributions:

New York Times | A Discredited Vaccine Study’s Continuing Impact on Public Health
Story and Video

The New Yorker | Talking to Vaccine Resisters
Story
 


The Huffington Post Live | Why are parents buying into vaccination myths?
Story

PBS Newshour | Measles outbreak linked to Disneyland has infected more than 70 people
NPR's Arun Rath talks with MIT science writer Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus.
Story

CBS News | Measles cases tied to vaccine fears
"These outbreaks are due in significant part to children not getting vaccinated," said MIT's Seth Mnookin.
Story
 


 

REDUCING CHILD POVERTY
Reducing our obscene level of child poverty | Robert Solow
New York Times columnist Charles Blow quotes Robert Solow, MIT economist, Nobel laureate, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, who wrote in his foreword to a 1994 CDF report, “As an economist I believe that good things are worth paying for; and that even if curing children’s poverty were expensive, it would be hard to think of a better use in the world for money.”
Story

 

MUSIC
MIT composer Elena Ruehr releases new collection
"Agilely combining trenchant virtuosity with keen lyricism, 'Lift' is a telling study in cumulative momentum...'Klein Suite' takes its cue from Bach’s unaccompanied violin music over its eloquent then energetic movements." — from Gramophone review
Listen to samples from Lift | Elena Ruehr website


INFLUENCE OF MIT ECONOMICS
Insiders, outsiders, and US monetary policy  | Paul Krugman
MIT Economics alumnus Paul Krugman discusses the importance of MIT in shaping the way he and other leaders think about monetary policy: “Olivier Blanchard, Ben Bernanke, Ken Rogoff, Mario Draghi, and yours truly all overlapped at MIT in the mid-70s; Larry Summers was at Harvard at the same time, taking courses at MIT; just about everyone was Stan Fischer’s student.”
Story
 


 


 

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