Q&A

Philip S. Khoury, Dean of SHASS Contributions and Opportunities

Professor Suzanne Berger Preparing Students to Become Global Leaders

Professor Tom Levenson Communicating Science to the Public

Trang V. Nguyen, PhD candidate Evaluating Public Schools in Madagascar

Nick Hunter '06, CMS and economics major Video Games as Self-Expression, Education

Woody Pak '92, composer and music producer Music Industry Trends and Challenges

New Ideas Brewing in MIT's Cauldron of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

When does a rock star visit MIT amid heavy secrecy? When it's U2 front man and social activist Bono, also Time's 2005 co-Person of the Year, discussing ways to alleviate poverty at MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). J-PAL, founded in 2003 as part of the Department of Economics, is the world's only research center gauging the effectiveness of poverty programs through scientific evaluations.

Bono's visit underscores the important work emanating from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). Indeed, 13 professors and alumni have won the Nobel Prize in Economics, five since 2000. U.S. News and World Report ranks MIT the nation's top graduate economics program. As another example, the philosophy department, despite its small size relative to peer programs, consistently ranks in the top 10 graduate philosophy programs in the English-speaking world, according to a report by The Philosophical Gourmet.

SHASS also boasts eight MacArthur fellows, three Pulitzer Prize winners, and a National Book Award winner. Additionally, Peabody Award winner Thomas Levenson, associate professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, won a 2005 National Academies Communications Award for his NOVA/PBS film "Origins: Back to the Beginning."

SHASS majors may be few, but on average, there are over 9,000 enrollments in SHASS classes every academic year. And, these days, 60-70 percent of incoming freshman have a strong interest and involvement in the arts. Students can choose from more than 50 music, theater, and dance groups on campus, and a campaign is currently underway to fund a new Performing Arts Laboratory. In fact, arts was added to the school's title in 2000 to reflect its burgeoning importance.

The coexistence of humanists and the scientists/engineers affecting change in the world allows SHASS to put a unique spin on humanities and social sciences. "I think our greatest opportunity is to design a new way of teaching humanities that will be a model for the acquisition of knowledge and method across major learning cultures," says SHASS Dean Philip S. Khoury. "We will need to accelerate the process of integrating learning in the humanities, arts, and social sciences with learning in science and engineering in our increasingly global community."

Using Technology and Determining Its Societal Impact

Technology is one way SHASS integrates learning and distinguishes itself from similar schools nationwide. Comparative Media Studies (CMS), the fastest-growing humanities undergraduate major, teaches students to create media as well as understand the cultural and social effects of those technologies. Nick Hunter '06 works at the Education Arcade, helping develop video games as learning tools. In April, CMS will launch Phase II of a MacArthur Foundation-funded project exploring new media literacy and creating K-12 curricular materials.

The HyperStudio, which is administered by Foreign Languages and Literatures, supports the development of educational media applications within the humanities. One such project is Cultura, a forum exchange that allows American students studying French to converse with French students studying English via a Web interface.

Literature Professor Peter Donaldson co-created Metamedia, a digital repository for sharing media-rich resources, which is housed in the HyperStudio. It has been used for a range of subjects, including Arab oral epic poetry and the Virtual Screening Room, a collection of interactive tutorials, film clips, and editing tools. Professor Donaldson also directs the Shakespeare Electronic Archive and Hamlet on the Ramparts, both of which are collections of texts, images, and Shakespeare films, and the Cross-Media Annotation System (XMAS), which enables students to create multimedia essays using DVDs. XMAS, an iCampus project, is now in its outreach phase with collaborators in universities throughout the U.S. and in Australia.

Hollywood composer Woody Pak '92, a Music and Theater Arts major, runs his own music production company that uses advanced digital technologies.

Professors from Science, Technology, and Society and Anthropology, through a National Science Foundation grant, are investigating the effects of new information technologies on professional identities and the conduct of scientific and professional work.

Providing a Global Educational Framework

SHASS also embodies a global outlook. Faculty from the political science department and the foreign languages and literatures and history sections boast an expertise on China, the world's fastest-growing economic power, that's unmatched in most universities.

A job that arose from a J-PAL training course took graduate economics student Trang V. Nguyen to Madagascar for nearly five months to help the World Bank and government evaluate a school reform program.

More than 1,700 students have studied, interned, or researched abroad in any of eight countries, such as China (shown above), through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) program, run under SHASS's Center for International Studies. Political Science Professor and MISTI Director Suzanne Berger advocated for a new minor in Applied International Studies, which the Institute approved in 2004.

New Educational Initiatives

Other new educational initiatives at SHASS include a graduate program in science writing, aimed at training writers to educate the public about science and technology advances.

The Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies, a collaboration among Boston-area universities to advance women's studies scholarship, moved to MIT in the fall and boosts the Institute's reputation in the field of gender studies.

The Department of Linguistics and Philosophy is in the process of creating a master's program in linguistics for speakers of threatened languages, such as Lardil, a northern Australian Aboriginal language. Graduates of the program will be able to use their linguistic knowledge to help their communities keep the languages alive. Additionally, the MIT Indigenous Language Initiative will allow MIT students and faculty to study indigenous and endangered languages and collaborate with native speaker linguists.

Read on to learn more about research at the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

• The Social Sciences Help Understand and Solve Society's Challenges
• Humanities and Arts Benefit from MIT's Multidisciplinary Environment