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School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Introduction
Research in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) is wide ranging. It stretches from behavioral economics and political economy to international relations and comparative history, from the history and anthropology of science and technology to the cultural analysis of new media, and from comparative literary criticism and musicology to the philosophy of mind and the deep structures of language. Artistic expression – creative writing, musical composition, and theater – is also very much part of the SHASS mix.
The culture of the single-investigator prevails in SHASS disciplines and fields. Research assistants may contribute to individual faculty research, but doctoral students are encouraged to develop independent dissertation topics apart from their supervisor's research. Nonetheless, in Economics, Linguistics, and Political Science collaborative research is increasingly important. Although laboratories are few, there are highly innovative labs in Comparative Media Studies, Foreign Languages and Literatures, and Linguistics.
The boundaries of SHASS academic units are increasingly porous. Anthropology, History, and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society straddle the humanities and social sciences. Our novelists, short story writers, and poets are as much a part of the humanities as they are part of the arts. Linguistics and Philosophy are closely engaged with Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Computer Science. Economics at MIT has long employed mathematical tools, and some areas of Political Science increasingly do. Music and Theater Arts includes historians, composers, conductors, performers, playwrights, and directors. Interdisciplinary research is a hallmark of SHASS.
Funding
The main sources of research funding are the major private foundations – Mellon, Ford, Carnegie, and Sloan in particular - and the NSF. Yet because private foundations do not pay full indirect costs, there are barriers to privately sponsored research. SHASS's largest and most important research arm in the social sciences, the 50-year-old Center for International Studies (CIS), is particularly vulnerable to this disincentive. The School is striving to ensure that under-recovery does not become a serious constraint to research initiatives. Artists and humanists at MIT, and across the United States, have been hampered in their creative activities and scholarship by deep budgetary cuts in the 1990s at two vital government agencies, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Fortunately, the Kenan Sahin Fund, established in 2001, and the SHASS Research Fund are helping faculty in the arts and humanities to pursue their creative and scholarly agendas in the absence of sustained external funding.
Examples Of Ongoing Research And Artistic Expression
Linguistics
MIT Linguistics has defined the field for over 40 years. MIT faculty revolutionized the study of language by relocating the object of study from "external" language use of texts and tongues to the bases of language in the mind and brain. This emphasis provided a scientific basis for the study of language and replaced the earlier descriptive foundations of the discipline. In recent years, the meaning of words and sentences has been more directly integrated into the general theory of grammar, with semantics taking its place beside phonetics as crucial fields in the comprehensive science of linguistics.
During the last few years, MIT has again taken the lead by merging linguistic theory and brain science. MIT's new MEG (magnetoencephalography) Laboratory exploits the latest brain imaging technology to reveal how the brain computes language. Findings from the Lab on morphological processing are beginning to reshape linguistic theory. MEG research is now investigating reading and dyslexia. Language processing in the visual modality illuminates problems of structural decomposition at the word and sentence level, and the disruption of reading in developmental dyslexia serves as a microscope for understanding unimpaired language processing.
Literature
The MIT Literature Faculty has had a major impact on scholarship in several key fields, including Shakespeare and the Renaissance, and in new areas of research on the literature of travel and cultural exchange, media studies, and gender studies.
Faculty in Literature and in Foreign Languages and Literatures are at the forefront of research in the application of new technologies to humanities research and education. One of the most innovative projects is the MIT Shakespeare Electronic Archive, which links all relevant materials across all media (early texts, art and illustration, film and filmed performances) to the lines of text to which they refer. The Archive is now available at MIT and collaborating institutions, including the Folger Library, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Archive group is involved in a joint project with Microsoft to extend this media-rich approach to remote collaborations and discussions, linking DVD and streaming video versions of Shakespeare films and plays to the other materials of the archive in a comprehensive and flexible annotation system. Early versions of the Shakespeare Annotation System have been used in MIT classes and have formed the basis for the first "video enhanced" scholarly distance seminars for the Shakespeare Association of America.
Music and Theater Arts
The Music and Theater Arts Section has grown around a core of creation and performance that is part of the hands-on research culture at MIT. In Music, senior composers have achieved international recognition. While maintaining strong leadership in the study, performance, and composition of Western classical music, the Music section also leads the cross-cultural movement in popular and classical music composition and performance.
Music and Theater Arts faculty work closely together and with outstanding guest artists to create innovative theatrical and choreographic productions, as well as more traditional opera, oratorio, and song. Recent examples range from the opera "Coyote's Dinner" with original libretto and score to "Crowd," a new dance work choreographed by internationally-renowned choreographer Gus Solomons, Jr. (BArch '61 and winner of the first Robert A. Muh Alumni Award honoring an MIT graduate for noteworthy contributions in a SHASS field). "Crowd" was created in collaboration with our dance and composition faculty and featured an original score.
Economics
The research topic most often associated with the MIT Economics Department of the 1950s and 1960s is the analysis of economic growth from a macroeconomic perspective. One faculty member and several former graduate students earned Nobel Prizes for their contributions to this area. Today, economic growth and issues of development are once again attracting many of the leading scholars in the field, and MIT is again in the vanguard. The new wave of research focuses on microeconomics: how specific policies and institutions shape economic growth.
The resurgence of interest in economic growth at MIT has drawn both faculty and graduate students to a wide variety of topics. How do structures of government, which in many cases were created by colonial powers several centuries ago, affect the growth of market institutions and therefore the rate of growth? What is the role of credit cooperatives in spreading risk and providing incentives for entrepreneurial ventures? How has the expansion of public education in Indonesia had significant pro-growth effects? In what ways does the corporate governance structure in India and elsewhere facilitate the expropriation of resources by small groups of investors and retard the expansion of equity-financed firms? Dissertation research on topics such as public health, the structure of labor markets, and the analysis of tax and expenditure policies further contributes to the broad recognition that MIT is transforming the field of development economics. This kind of research has the potential to generate real improvements in living standards for many inhabitants of developing nations.
Political Science
The MIT Political Science Department emerged at the height of the Cold War, and its initial research focus was strongly shaped by the problems facing the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. Faculty did applied research on weapons and military strategy and developed new ways of understanding how people deal with military crises. The Cold War also generated substantial interest in political development, communications, and the technologies of democracy.
MIT Political Science has evolved along with changes in international and domestic politics. The department, in conjunction with the CIS, now has the nation's leading Security Studies Program, broadly realist in outlook and focused on how countries pursue national interests. More recently, Political Science has developed a strong group in positive political economy, which also draws on faculty in Economics. The group's project is to map the form and politics of democratic institutions and to measure their effects on policy and on the long-term economic and social consequences of policy. Faculty are examining the degree to which legislative decisions reflect the electoral institutions (districts) and legislative institutions (parties) of government; how federalism more often weakens fiscal accountability and leads to high debt levels rather than to efficient sharing of costs and responsibilities; and how uncovering the sources of people's expressed preferences through the use of game theory and social theory helps to explain the development of social and political identity in India.
A complete picture of programs and significant research in SHASS can hardly be described adequately in a short summary. What can be said is that the SHASS research enterprise is rich and diverse and parallels in quality and inventiveness that of MIT's other schools.
I wish to thank Professors Alec Marantz (Linguistics), Peter Donaldson (Literature), Ellen Harris (Music and Theater Arts), James Poterba (Economics), and Joshua Cohen and Stephen Ansolabehere (Political Science) for contributing to this article.
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