Six faculty receive MIT SHASS Research Fund awards for 2022

The SHASS Research Fund supports research in the Institute's humanities, arts, and social science fields that shows promise of making an important contribution to the proposed area of activity.

Congratulations to the 2022 Recipients

Dwai Banerjee | Associate Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society
SHASS research funding will enable Banerjee's work on the project A Counter History of Computing in India. Although India supplies cheap technological labor to the rest of the world, the country lags behind in basic computing education, research, and development. Banerjee will trace major shifts in the relation between the Indian state and computer science since the 1950s.
Dwai Banerjee's website

Tristan Brown | Assistant Professor, History
Brown will use the SHASS Fund to collect data on the spread of Islam in China during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. This research could potential reveal that the Chinese state during these periods were often heavily involved in the creation and support of Islamic institutions. The final product will be a website where scholars can examine and engage in data-driven maps showing the historical location of mosques across China and the individuals associated with their creation.
Tristan Brown's website

Eric Goldberg | Professor of History
The Research Fund will enable Goldberg's research trip to Berlin in summer 2022 for his new book project, The Carolingians and the Vikings: Contact, Conflict, and Accommodation, 751-987. This book will work against stereotypes of the Scandinavian raiders to provide a valuable new perspective on the history of the ninth and tenth centuries in Europe.
Eric Goldberg's website

Nick Montfort | Professor, Comparative Media Studies/Writing
This funding will support two of Montfort's ongoing projects. The first is 101 BASIC Poems, a literary and media endevaour that will present short computer programs for classic computers that rework and comment on poetry and art of the past century. The Fund will also support the development of Curveship, a programming plaform for creating variable narratives which has potential creative, learning, and research uses.
Nick Montfort's website

Tanalís Padilla | Professor of History
Padilla will conduct short-term exploratory research trips in Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico for her new book on the effects of Cuba's medical internationalism in Latin America. Since 1960, hundreds of thousands of Cuban medical professionals were sent to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, jarring with the island's longstanding symbolism of anti-imperialism. Padilla will investigate the local impacts of these international political transactions.
Tanalís Padilla's website

Ken Urban | Senior Lecturer, Music and Theater Arts
Urban will use the SHASS research funding to create a new multimedia play, The Conquered, to be directed by Jay Scheib, Class of 1949 Professor of Theater Arts. The production will bring six actors to campus along with a design team for a two-week intensive workshop in the new year using MIT's technical resources to produce video and audio elements for the play.
Ken Urban's website

2022 Research Fund Recipients

Top Row: Dwai Banerjee, Associate Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society; Tristan Brown, Assistant Professor, History; Eric Goldberg, Professor of History. Lower Row: Nick Montfort, Professor, Comparative Media Studies/Writing; Tanalís Padilla, Professor of History; Ken Urban, Senior Lecturer, Music and Theater Arts

MIT SHASS Research and Innovation
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MIT SHASS is home to research that has a global impact, and to graduate programs recognized as among the finest in the world. With 13 academic fields, the School's research portfolio includies international studies, linguistics, economics, poverty alleviation, history, literature, anthropology, digital humanities, philosophy, global languages, music and theater arts, writing, political science, security studies, women's and gender studies, and comparative media studies.
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