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.