Bring together visionary minds from across nations and disciplines, and the creative results are bound to be extraordinary. The SHASS environment has inspired faculty, students, and alumni to make revolutionary discoveries and create path-breaking books, operas, and inventions.

Every day, leading-edge scholarship and ideas are emerging from research initiatives, cross-institute collaborations, and partnerships with government and industry. The MIT/Caltech Voting Technology Project and the Indigenous Language Project are just two of the SHASS innovations that are advancing knowledge in critical areas of human endeavor.

Professor Daron Acemoglu selected for Charles P. Kindleberger Professorship
Dean Philip S. Khoury of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is pleased to announce that Professor Daron Acemoglu, of the Department of Economics, has been selected to be the inaugural holder of the Charles P. Kindleberger Professorship in Applied Economics, for a five-year renewable term effective March 1, 2004.

Professor Acemoglu received his MSc and PhD degrees at the London School of Economics, and has been at MIT since 1993. His recent work in political economy explores the powerful links between political structure, legal and market institutions, and a nation's long-run rate of economic growth.

The Kindleberger Professorship was recently established at MIT through the generosity of Dr. Ching Chih Chen, who received a PhD (1967) from the MIT Department of Economics and was a student of the late Professor Kindleberger.

Stefan Helmreich Receives James A. (1945) and Ruth Levitan Prize in the Humanities
Philip S. Khoury, Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences has announced that the 2006 Levitan Prize in the Humanities has been awarded to Associate Professor Stefan Helmreich of the Anthroplogy Program.

Professor Helmreich received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University, and joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in the Anthropology Program in 2003.

The $25,000 prize was established through a gift from the late James A. Levitan, a 1945 MIT graduate in chemistry, who was also a member of the MIT Corporation and Of-Counsel at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom of New York City. The prize, first awarded in 1990, supports innovative and creative scholarship in the humanities by faculty members in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Professor Helmreich will complete research for his book, "Alien Ocean: An Anthropology of Marine Microbiology and the Limits of Life," in which he will, in his own words, "describe the emergence, in United States venues, of new scientific descriptions of the ocean in the age of DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, and research into microbial life forms existing at extremes of pressure, temperature, and nutrition, asking how the extreme marine world revealed by microbial biology may reinstall as well as reinvent broader public sensibilities about the sea as both life threatening and life-giving, as a space at once strange and sublime."

Equal Votes, Equal Money
In "Equal Votes, Equal Money: Court Ordered Redistricting and the Distribution of Public Expenditures in the American States," Stephen Ansolabehere, Elting E. Morison Professor of Political Science, and Jim Snyder, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, use court-ordered reapportionment of state legislatures-the legendary one-person, one-vote ruling-to measure how representation within legislatures translates into public policy outcomes. Their analysis indicates that equalizing representation leads to equalization of public spending. In fact, they estimate that a county with 100 percent more representation than another could receive 20 percent more funding for highways, schools, and other public activities. The work was awarded the Heinz Eulau Prize for the best paper in the American Political Science Review in 2002.

Ulysses World Premier
John Harbison's full-length ballet score, "Ulysses," composed in 1983, will be performed for the first time in its entirety by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project at Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory during the 2003-2004 season. Based on Homer's The Odyssey, the piece has been revised by the composer for this world premiere performance. "I decided to do 'Ulysses' because I was so fascinated by Stravinsky's collaboration with choreographer George Balanchine," Harbison told the Boston Globe. "I had also recently seen Monteverdi's opera 'The Return of Ulysses' and knew I had found my subject." Institute Professor of Music, Harbison won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his cantata "The Flight into Egypt."

Why the Poor Stay Poor
One key reason why the poor remain poor, especially in developing countries, is that they lack the financial resources to make the investments that could help them get out of poverty. In "(Mis)allocation of Capital," Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics Abhijit Banerjee (jointly with Castle Krob Career Development Professor Esther Duflo and MIT Ph.D. Kaivan Munshi, of Brown University), has shown that those who are socially connected to the wealthy in India often invest much more than their more able but less fortunately born countrymen. This dependence on family wealth suggests that the banking sector in India is not channeling credit to its best uses. The paper, published in the Journal of the European Economic Association, goes on to show that when banks are given strong incentives to lend to small firms, those small firms generate very high rates of growth in sales and profits. Recently, Banerjee and MIT economists Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan started the MIT Poverty Action Laboratory to provide scientific evaluations of policy interventions aimed at fighting poverty.

Growth Theory through the Centuries
The determinants of long-term economic growth have long fascinated economists, and some of the most important economic research on growth economics has been done at MIT. In "Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution," Daron Acemoglu of the MIT Economics Department, Simon Johnson of the MIT Sloan School, and James Robinson of UC-Berkeley present new insights on the relative growth rates of different nations in the centuries following European colonial expansion. They find that countries that were relatively sparsely populated and poor at the beginning of the colonial period subsequently experienced faster economic growth than countries that were richer. They attribute this difference to the installation of growth- and investment-friendly institutions in the relatively poor colonial areas and to the presence of extractive institutions in regions that were previously wealthy.

Learning from the First Globalization
Suzanne Berger, Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science, puts escalating hopes and fears about globalization into historical perspective in her new book The First Globalization: Lessons from the French. Berger examines the social and economic struggles of countries in the North Atlantic economy during what she terms "the first globalization," beginning in the 1870s and continuing up to the First World War. She identifies the strains on democracy of a borderless society and observes the fate of domestic social reform in a world of mobile assets. By examining the lessons of an earlier time, Berger hopes to "widen the aperture of the lens of interpretation through which we see our own situation and to help us better identify our options."

Trees and Seas of Information
In "Trees and Seas of Information: Alien Kinship and the Biopolitics of Gene Transfer in Marine Biology and Biotechnology," Assistant Professor of Anthropology Stefan Helmreich outlines the preliminary results of his ethnographic fieldwork among marine biologists and biotechnologists in Hawaii, California, and Massachusetts. The paper was published in the American Ethnologist 30(3):341-359, 2003. Helmreich's fieldwork is part of a larger research project "Recasting the Nature and Properties of the Sea in the Genomic Age," which is funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Theater Arts Calendar
MIT Theater Arts, Dramashop, and the DanceTheater Ensemble have developed a calendar to keep the community informed of their rich and diverse season. In addition to the production of classic repertoire like Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the roster includes the performance of work written by students and faculty and concludes in a special "Playwrights in Performance" event.

The Making of an Engineer
The making of engineers at four very different engineering schools is the subject of a six-year longitudinal study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Under the direction of Professor of Anthropology Susan Silbey and colleagues at City University of New York, the study will follow the engineering education of students at Smith College, Olin College of Engineering, University of Massachusetts, and MIT. Using a variety of methods, including observation, in-depth interviews, student diaries, and web surveys, the study will collect data over four years of college and through the first year of employment to observe variations that occur in the production of engineers.

The Impact of New Technologies on Professions
Professors Sherry Turkle (PI), Joseph Dumit, Hugh Gusterson, David A. Mindell (STS) and Professor of Anthropology Susan Silbey (Anthropology) have received a grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the effects of new information technologies on professional identities and the conduct of scientific and professional work. They hosted a conference in September 2003 to explore areas where there has been a rethinking of the nature of the disciplines as a result of the introduction of visualization and simulation.

The Civilian-Military Dynamic
The faculty, research associates, and graduate students in the Civil-Military Relations Working Group bring widely varying experience, theoretical perspectives, and methodological preferences to a common goal: understanding how militaries and civilians co-exist in democratic polities. The group examines the dynamics of how civilians control the military and the degree to which these militaries are representative of their respective civilian populations. The goal is to produce case studies of the topic as it relates to the United States, East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Eastern and Western Europe. Class of 1954 Career Development Professor Chappell Lawson, Associate Professor of Political Science Roger Petersen, and Ford Foundation International Professor of Political Science Richard Samuels have organized the working group, which has produced the conceptual basis for an edited volume it hopes to produce in the next two years.

International Web Exchange
MIT's Foreign Languages and Literatures Section has developed a new and innovative genre of web applications that foster the exchange and discussion of cultural ideas between students in different countries. Projects such as MIT-Valencia (MITUPV) and Cultura make use of an advanced media repository that allows students and faculty across the globe to annotate, discuss, and share media documents.

Media in Transition Book Series
MIT Press has announced the launch of the "Media in Transition" book series. Professor of Literature David Thorburn is editor in chief; Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies program, and Edward Barrett, Senior Lecturer in Writing, are coeditors. The series grows out of the "MIT Media in Transition" project, a series of public forums and conferences hosted between 1998 and 2000, which studied both old and new media systems and examined the political impact of contemporary media technologies. The project culminated in 2000 with an international conference that inaugurated MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. The first two volumes of the series-Democracy and New Media and Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition-present some of the strongest and most influential papers delivered during the Media in Transition project.

Gabriela Mistral in Translation
Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Latin American to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature, is often characterized as a healing, maternal voice who spoke on behalf of women, indigenous peoples, the disenfranchised, children, and the rural poor. She was also a poet of philosophical meditation, self-consciousness, and daring. Gabriela Mistral: Prose and Prose-Poems, edited and translated by Professor of Literature Stephen Tapscott, is the first English-language edition of her works. This bilingual volume gathers the most famous and representative of Gabriela Mistral's prose writings, which have not been as readily available to English-only readers as her poetry. Tapscott rounds out the volume with a chronology of Mistral's life and a brief introduction to her prose.

The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project
The Wôpanâak language (also spelled Wampanoag) was once spoken in eastern Massachusetts but has had no speakers in more than a century. It enjoys a particularly large corpus of texts (including a translation of the Bible by John Eliot in 1663, the first complete Bible in any language published in this hemisphere) and it is a member of the large Algonquian family of languages, which has been studied by linguists for many decades. Begun in 1993, the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project takes advantage of both of these fortunate circumstances to reconstruct the grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary of the language.