NEWS AND FEATURE WRITING
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (2008-2022)
In 2008, when Dean Deborah Fitzgerald initiated the School’s first communications program, MIT’s humanistic fields became more visible than at any earlier time in the Institute’s history. Over fifteen years, our team produced hundreds of news and features stories on research, courses, people, ideas, and awards in MIT’s world-class humanistic fields. Scroll this page to see selected stories. Browse more collected stories at MIT News.
News Team:
Editorial Director, Developmental and Final Editor, Designer: Emily Hiestand
Principal Writers: Kathryn O’Neill, Leda Zimmerman, Alison Lanier / Additional writers: Daniel Pritchard, Meg Murphy, Sarah Wright, Peter N. Dunn, Nicole Estvanik Taylor, Lynda Morgenroth
Leadership: Deans Fitzgerald, Nobles, and Rayo
SELECTED STORIES
Communities in the Cloud
Anthropology PhD student Steven Gonzalez studies the Cloud from within
photo by Jon Sachs
Many of us think of the data storage system called “the Cloud” as intangible and disentangled from day-to-day life. But Anthropology PhD student Gonzalez shows that the Cloud is a massive system, ubiquitous in daily life, that contains huge amounts of energy, has the potential for environmental disaster, and is operated by an insular community of expert technicians. Story
“Sci-fi enables us to envision a more just world, beyond what is ‘feasible’ in our current political constraints. As an engineer who will probably help shape our world in the next decades of the climate crisis, it feels vital that I world-build with others, hearing each other’s thoughts and dreaming of a better system together.” — Jocelyn T., Student in Materials Science & Engineering Story
How healthy is the U.S. voting system?
In 2016, MIT political scientist and leading Amercan election administration expert Prof. Charles Stewart III explained why the U.S. electoral system was strong — and how MIT research has been making the voting process even more seamless. Story
MIT Professors Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and Professor Michael Kremer of Harvard, at the 2019 Nobel Ceremony; photo courtesy of The Nobel Foundation
Their work “has been highly innovative in the area of development economics, emphasizing the use of field experiments in research in order to realize the benefits of laboratory-style randomized, controlled trials. Duflo and Banerjee have applied this new precision while studying a wide range of topics implicated in global poverty, including health care, education, agriculture, and gender issues, while developing new antipoverty programs based on their research.”
Story — archival link
With “Choctaw Animals” for piano, MIT composer Charles Shadle honors his Native American heritage
Collage: Emily Hiestand,
“I have written a number of pieces that explore aspects of my Choctaw heritage,” Shadles says, “but these works tend to be rather difficult, requiring numerous highly accomplished players.” … Choctaw Animals” is a series of four pieces intended for pianists of all ages and abilities. “My thought was that they could be played by young people taking piano lessons,” he says.
Story
Listen to the recordings: “Chulhkvn” | “Nvni” | “Nashoba” | “Issuba”
3 Questions: Administering elections
with MIT professor of political science Charles Stewart III
iStock image
October 26, 2021— Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, is a renowned expert on U.S. election administration. Stewart founded MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, which recently teamed up with the American Enterprise Institute to release a major report: Lessons Learned from the 2020 Election. MIT SHASS Communications asked Stewart to share some additional insights on the state of US elections.
MIT is very unusual “in requiring eight humanities, arts, and social science classes for all undergraduates, and requiring concentrations,” notes literature Professor Arthur Bahr. “That gives people like me and others in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences a platform that a lot of our colleagues elsewhere don’t have.” Story
Scene at MIT: Stata-o'-lantern
Photo by Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine PhD ’14
”MIT Linguistics has celebrated the Halloween season with an annual pumpkin carving party since 2010, the year that Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine PhD ’14 dazzled his fellow scholars with this Stata-o’-lantern. It was created in the likeness of Building 32, MIT's iconic Ray and Maria Stata Center, designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry and home to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. ‘I somehow had the idea of trying to carve the Stata Center,’ says Erlewine, now an assistant professor of linguistics at the National University of Singapore. Of course, this would require a deconstruction of the pumpkin form itself!’” Story
Gamma Sonification
MIT students make music from particle energy
L to R: Keldin Sergheyev, Helen Liu, and Nick Lopez. Photo by Jon Sachs
Midway through Keeril Makan's “Introduction to Composition” class, three MIT nuclear engineering students had invented “a new technique for generating sound texture compositions — one that uses gamma radiation.” So, sound from the decaying atoms from the big bang that began the universe. “Reflecting on the project, Sergheyev says, ‘The nuclear part was easy. The music part was the larger challenge.’”
Story + Listen to the Gamma Ray recordings on Sound Cloud
"By providing a deeper understanding of the ways in which people relate to the material world, to land, and to other beings, anthropological analyses also shed light on the root causes of climate change and expand our imagination of how to live otherwise." — Professor Bettina Stoetzer Story
Created by students in the Digital Humanities Lab, the Sonification Toolkit is a set of digital tools that enable conversion of almost anything — from data to drawings — into sound that is aesthetically satisfying and analytically illuminating. Story
"For over four decades, Leo Marx's work has focused on the relationship between technology and culture in 19th- and 20th-century America. His research helped define the area of American Studies which understands scientific and technological activities in the context of broader American society and culture." Story + 3Q: Rosalind Williams on Machine in the Garden - archival link
MIT is often ranked #1 globally for Economics, as it was in the 2020 Times Higher Education World University Rankings. MIT has also recently been ranked No. 1 in the world for Social Sciences and No. 2 for Arts and Humanities by Times Higher Education a leading British education magazine. — Archival links
“The Council gives the MIT community the kind of deep discourse that is so necessary to face climate change and a rapidly changing world. These conversations open an opportunity to create a new kind of breakthrough of mindsets.” — John Fernández ’85, Professor of Architecture; Director, MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative Story
"Even the most technocratic assessment of costs and benefits makes assumptions about the value of human life and the demands of justice. Making our ethics more explicit improves our moral thinking. This is particularly true when the questions are ones of public policy." — Kieran Setiya, MIT Professor of Philosophy Story
“The beauty of the Iñupiaq language is that the perspective and the wisdom of my ancestors has been preserved in the language. If we lose our language, we lose our ability to see into the minds of the people who were able to thrive — for millennia — in one of the harshest climates in the world.” — Annauk Denise Olin, Linguistics graduate student in the MIT Indigenous Languages Initiative Story
