Faculty Fellows Awardees - MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

The SHASS Faculty Fellows program allows selected faculty to focus on their research, build community, and pursue mentorship opportunities. Administered by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative, awardees spend a semester outside the classroom while still holding time for sustained interaction with a small cohort of colleagues while investing in a unique, cross-disciplinary set of conversations.

Héctor BELTRÁN

2025 | Héctor Beltrán

Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor
Anthropology

Faculty Fellow Héctor Beltrán is a sociocultural anthropologist who draws upon his interdisciplinary background to study how the technical aspects of computing inform and are shaped by social structures and lived experiences of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation.

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Volha Charnysh

2025 | Volha Charnysh

Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science
Political Science

Faculty Fellow Volha Charnysh is the Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science. She studies the role of identity in state-building and economic development and the long-term effects of violence with a regional focus on Europe and Eurasia.

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Kevin Dorst

2025 | Kevin Dorst

Associate Professor
Philosophy

Faculty Fellow Kevin Dorst ’19 is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He works mainly in epistemology and cognitive science, focusing on questions about rationality: what it is, why it matters, and whether we have it.

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Richard Nielsen

2025 | Richard Nielsen

Associate Professor
Political Science

Faculty Fellow Richard Nielsen is an Associate Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science. He studies and teaches on Middle East politics, International Relations, religion, gender, political violence, quantitative methodology, and interpretive methodology.

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Emily Richmond Pollock

2025 | Emily Richmond Pollock

Associate Professor
Music

Faculty Fellow Emily Richmond Pollock is an Associate Professor of Music in the Music Section. Her research focuses particularly on conservatism, the historicization of modernist musical value, operatic institutions, and the relationship between modern musical style and convention.

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Jessica Ruffin

2025 | Jessica Ruffin

Assistant Professor
Literature

Faculty Fellow Jessica Ruffin is an Assistant Professor in the Literature Section. Her research and creative scholarly output focus ethics as a problem of environmental and historical relation. Ruffin has particular interest in how Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s aesthetics share poetic and temporal resonance with Black and Indigenous thought.

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Robin Scheffler

2025 | Robin Scheffler

Associate Professor
Science, Technology, and Society

Faculty Fellow Robin Scheffler is an Associate Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He is an historian of the modern biological and biomedical sciences and their intersections with developments in American history.

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