SHASS News

Meet the 2025 tenured professors in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
In 2025, six faculty were granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Sara Brown is an associate professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. She develops stage designs for theater, opera, and dance by approaching the scenographic space as a catalyst for collective imagination. Her work is rooted in […]
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Joshua Bennett awarded Institute for Advanced Study fellowship
The prestigious fellowship allows for focused research and the free and open exchange of ideas among an international community of scholars.
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3 Questions: On humanizing scientists
Alan Lightman has spent much of his authorial career writing about scientific discovery, the boundaries of knowledge, and remarkable findings from the world of research. His latest book “The Shape of Wonder,” co-authored with the lauded English astrophysicist Martin Rees and published this month by Penguin Random House, offers both profiles of scientists and an […]
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A better understanding of debilitating head pain
Everyone gets headaches. But not everyone gets cluster headache attacks, a debilitating malady producing acute pain that lasts an hour or two. Cluster headache attacks come in sets — hence the name — and leave people in complete agony, unable to function. A little under 1 percent of the U.S. population suffers from cluster headache. […]
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Understanding shocks to welfare systems
In an unhappy coincidence, the Covid-19 pandemic and Angie Jo’s doctoral studies in political science both began in 2019. Paradoxically, this global catastrophe helped define her primary research thrust. As countries reacted with unprecedented fiscal measures to protect their citizens from economic collapse, Jo MCP ’19 discerned striking patterns among these interventions: Nations typically seen […]
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