Héctor Beltrán ‘07, the Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor in Anthropology, has been awarded the 2025 James A. and Ruth Levitan Prize in the Humanities. The prize, which carries a $30,000 research award, is awarded annually to support innovative and creative scholarship in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

For two days at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, participants in the Kuggie Vallee Distinguished Lectures and Workshops celebrated the success of women in science and shared strategies to persist through, or better yet dissipate, the stiff headwinds women still face in the field.

“Everyone is here to celebrate and to inspire and advance the accomplishments of all women in science,” said host Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and director of the Picower Institute, as she welcomed an audience that included scores of students, postdocs, and other research trainees. “It is a great feeling to have the opportunity to showcase examples of our successes and to help lift up the next generation.”

In 2021, Michael Short, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, approached professor of anthropology Manduhai Buyandelger with an unusual pitch: collaborating on a project to prototype a molten salt heat bank in Mongolia, Buyandelger’s country of origin and place of her scholarship. It was also an invitation to forge a novel partnership between two disciplines that rarely overlap. Developed in collaboration with the National University of Mongolia (NUM), the device was built to provide heat for people in colder climates, and in places where clean energy is a challenge. 

Buyandelger and Short teamed up to launch Anthro-Engineering Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale, an initiative intended to advance the heat bank idea in Mongolia, and ultimately demonstrate its potential as a scalable clean heat source in comparably challenging sites around the world. This project received funding from the inaugural MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Seed Awards program. In order to fund various components of the project, especially student involvement and additional staff, the project also received support from the MIT Global Seed Fund, New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET), Experiential Learning Office, Vice Provost for International Activities, and d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education.

Every year since 1991, MIT has welcomed outstanding visiting scholars to campus through the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program. The Institute aspires to attract candidates who are, in King’s words, “trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom.”

MLK Scholars enhance the intellectual and cultural life of the Institute through teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and through active research collaborations with faculty. They work within MIT’s academic departments, but also across fields such as medicine, the arts, law, and public service. The program honors King’s life and legacy by expanding and extending the reach of our community.

Joining MIT in January 2025, Leslie Jonas, an elder member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, is an Indigenous land and water conservationist with a focus on weaving traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM).

Christine Taylor-Butler ’81, member of the 2023–24 MLK Visiting Scholars cohort is extending her visit with MIT for an additional year: she will build on her existing partnerships on campus and in the local communities in promoting STEAM literacy for children.

Amy Moran-Thomas is an associate professor in MIT Anthropology. Her ethnographic research focuses on how health technologies and ecologies are designed and come to be materially embodied — often inequitably — by people in their ordinary lives.

Bettina Stoetzer is an associate professor in MIT Anthropology. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, globalization, and social justice in Europe and the U.S. Bettina’s award-winning book, “Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2022),” draws on fieldwork with immigrant and refugee communities, as well as ecologists, nature enthusiasts and other Berlin residents to illustrate how human-environment relations become a key register through which urban citizenship is articulated in Europe.

Dean Agustín Rayo and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences recently welcomed nine new professors to the MIT community. They arrive with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research.

Sonya Atalay joins the Anthropology Section as a professor. She is a public anthropologist and archaeologist who studies Indigenous science protocols, practices, and research methods carried out with and for Indigenous communities. Atalay is the director and principal investigator of the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science, a newly established National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center. She has expertise in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and served two terms on the National NAGPRA Review Committee, first appointed by the Bush administration and then for a second term by the Obama administration. Atalay has produced a series of research-based comics in partnership with Native nations about repatriation of Native American ancestral remains, return of sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony under NAGPRA law. Atalay earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

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.