The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) has announced several changes to the leadership of its academic units for the 2024-25 academic year.

“I’m confident these outstanding members of the SHASS community will provide exceptional leadership. I’m excited to see each implement their vision for the future of their unit,” says Agustin Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of MIT SHASS.

• Chris Walley will serve as head of Anthropology. Walley is the SHASS Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. She received a PhD in anthropology from New York University in 1999. Her first ethnography, “Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park,” explored environmental conflict in coastal Tanzania. More recently, she is the author of “Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago” as well as co-creator of a documentary film (with director Chris Boebel) entitled “Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story.” She is the director of the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project, an online multimedia initiative.

MIT faculty and staff authors have published a plethora of books, chapters, and other literary contributions in the past year. The following titles represent some of their works published in the past 12 months. In addition to links for each book from its publisher, the MIT Libraries has compiled a helpful list of the titles held in its collections.

Looking for more literary works from the MIT community? Enjoy our book lists from 2023, 2022, and 2021.

Happy reading!

“A Book of Waves” (Duke University Press, 2023) - By Stefan Helmreich, professor of anthropology

“Code Work: Hacking Across the U.S./México Techno-Borderlands” (Princeton University Press, 2023) - By Héctor Beltrán, assistant professor of anthropology

MIT professor Heather Paxson has been named associate dean for faculty of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), effective July 1.

Agustin Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS, describes Paxson as a leader of exceptional vision.

“As section head, she has positioned Anthropology as a key player in the issues of our day and has implemented an exemplary model of mentorship for junior faculty. She is an essential advisor to the school, and I cannot think of a better person to reimagine SHASS's efforts to create an inspiring and equitable working environment for our faculty and staff,” says Rayo.

On the first Friday in November, the students of 21A.513 (Drawing Human Experience) were greeted by two unfamiliar figures: a bespectacled monkey holding a heart-shaped message (“I’m so glad you are here”) and the person who drew that monkey on the whiteboard: award-winning cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry, whose “Picture This” was a central text on the new interdisciplinary course’s syllabus.

As the afternoon’s guest speaker, Barry welcomed each arrival, her long gray braids swinging, pens dangling from her neck. Within minutes, she had everyone — even the course’s instructors, anthropologist Graham Jones and visual artist Seth Riskin — settled around tables with their eyes closed, drawing giraffes.

The Levitan Prize was inaugurated in 1990 and is awarded annually as a research fund to support innovative and creative scholarship in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Awarded for "Unsettling Refuge: Disrupted Mobilities in Multispecies Worlds"

Stoetzer’s proposal promises to broaden and deepen the fieldwork underpinning her exciting second book project on multispecies worldmaking.

MIT Anthropology Class of 1957 Career Development Assistant Professor Héctor Beltrán is the author of the new book, “Code Work: Hacking Across the U.S./México Techno-Borderlands,” published by Princeton University Press.

Professor Manduhai Buyangelger was presented the 2022 Onon prize at the October 2nd, 2023 Onon Lecture at Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit of University of Cambridge, UK.

Bettina Stoetzer’s Ruderal City is an imaginative and beautifully written ethnography of how Berlin’s forests, gardens, peripheries, and blasted landscapes and rubble fields (now obscured but not disappeared) have become, post-World War II and again post-1989, an uncanny home for heterogeneous lives and world-making. Ruderal City re-reads Berlin’s famous forests and gardens as spaces of exclusion, where refugees inhabit the uncanny ruins of the socialist built/forested landscape.

"We envision a new generation of students, scientists and Indigenous community members with the skills and training to conduct research ethically using braided methodologies and to apply the results to improve quality of life through a healthier planet." - Sonya Atalay, Provost Professor of Anthropology at UMASS, Visiting Professor at MIT Anthropology and Director of CBIKS

Ocean waves are easy on the eyes, but hard on the brain. How do they form? How far do they travel? How do they break? Those magnificent waves you see crashing into the shore are complex.

“I’ve often asked this question,” the eminent wave scientist Walter Munk told MIT Professor Stefan Helmreich several years ago. “If we met somebody from another planet who had never seen waves, could [they] dream about what it’s like when a wave becomes unstable in shallow water? About what it would do? I don’t think so. It’s a complicated problem.”

Mongolia, often hailed with the celestial moniker of “The Land of the Eternal Blue Sky,” paradoxically succumbs to a veil of pollution and energy struggles during the winter months, obscuring the true shade of the cherished vista.

MIT students from classes 22.S094 (Climate and Sustainability Systems: Decarbonizing Ulaanbaatar at Scale) and 21A.S01 (Anthro-Engineering: Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale) visited Mongolia to conduct on-site surveys, diving into the diverse tapestry of local life as they gleaned insight from various stakeholder groups.

MIT News article, originally printed in SHASS Said and Done magazine, "In The Classroom" profile of 21A.311: The Social Lives of Medical Objects, a course taught by Amy Moran-Thomas, Associate Professor of Anthropology and the 2022 winner of the Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award.

21A.S01 Anthro-Engineering: Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale, co-taught by Professors Manduhai Buyandelger of MIT Anthropology and Michael Short of MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering (and faculty lead of MIT’s NEET Climate & Sustainability Systems thread) catalyzed MIT students and educators to journey to the Mongolian capital city, Ulaanbataar, over IAP 2023.

Prof. Buyandelger's framing of Ulaanbataar's power and pollution problem through an anthropological lens proved instrumental in deepening students' understanding of the intricate dynamics at play. She asks, "The prototype works in the lab, but does it work in real life once you factor in the challenges in the larger structures of delivery, production, and implementation in Mongolia?"

Students from MIT Anthropology's DV Lab class shot footage documenting 2022's Living Climate Futures events including: Indigenous Earth Day, Environmental Justice and Climate Resilience Tour at GreenRoots in Chelsea, and EcoTown Workshop Event.

"A class like Paranormal Machines complements the educational mission of the Institute by giving students an opportunity to reflect critically and creatively on what science and technology do in these students lives." - Graham Jones

2022 NEW DIRECTIONS AWARD - GROUP CATEGORY | Honorable Mention: Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project (SECASP)

Christine J. Walley, Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The recently launched Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project (SECASP) (sechicagohistory.org)  is an online collaborative venture. It highlights materials donated to the all-volunteer Southeast Chicago Historical Museum by the multiracial working-class residents who historically settled in this former steel mill region. The website uses residents' saved objects – and the stories they told about them – to bring to life everyday experiences of work, immigration, job loss, and environmental contamination from the point of view of residents themselves.

The GAD Awards Committee acknowledges the creativity, innovation, and broad dissemination of anthropological insights of SECASP, a collaborative digital project that exposes the public to the history and material culture of Chicago's ethnically diverse working-class neighborhoods.

MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart has announced three Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grants to support bold research projects across diverse areas of study including biology, engineering, and the humanities.

Among this year's recipients are Graham Jones of the Anthropology Section and Arvind Satayanaryan of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Their “Magical Data Visualization” proposal uses performance magic to create new visualizations that are responsive to the users’ intent, potentially impacting how misinformation spreads. 

The MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) has awarded 20 projects a total of $5 million over two years in its first-ever 2022 MCSC Seed Awards program. The winning projects are led by principal investigators across all five of MIT’s schools.

The goal of the MCSC seed awards is to engage MIT researchers and link the economy-wide work of the consortium to ongoing and emerging climate and sustainability efforts across campus. The program offers further opportunity to build networks among the awarded projects to deepen the impact of each and ensure the total is greater than the sum of its parts.

Social dimensions and adaptation

• Anthro-Engineering Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale, Manduhai Buyandelger, professor in the Anthropology Program; Michael Short, Class of ’42 Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering

Arthur Richard Steinberg, a nationally recognized educator  and professor emeritus of anthropology at MIT, died April 3, 2022. He was 85. A cofounder of the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology as well as the founder of an innovative interdisciplinary program for MIT’s first-year students, Steinberg had been a faculty member at the Institute for 38 years when he retired in 2002.