Spring 2001 Crossing boundaries New faculty Honors & awards Book notes       All issues This issue only Help   Soundings is a publication of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT Comments and questions to www-shass@mit.edu	Introducing new faculty Victor Chernozhukov David Kaiser Joshua D. Sosin William Uricchio Muhamet Yildiz
	Photo: Graham G. Ramsay Victor Chernozhukov, an assistant professor in the Economics Department, specializes in econometrics and financial economics. He received his PhD in economics from Stanford University in 2000 and an MS in statistics from the University of Illinois in 1997. His dissertation, "Conditional Extremes and Near Extremes: Concepts, Inference and Economic Applications," develops a regression analogue of extreme value theory and its applications to price and job search models, decision making under extreme uncertainty, risk management and auction models. His current research focuses on extreme value theory and its applications, methods of flexible estimation and inference in econometrics, rational beliefs and learning in dynamic models, and transition to market economy in Russia. He is a recipient of the Sloan Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.
	Photo: Graham G. Ramsay David Kaiser, an assistant professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, specializes in the history of modern physics. He obtained an AB in physics from Dartmouth College in 1993, completed a PhD in theoretical physics at Harvard in 1997 and earned his PhD in the history of science from Harvard in 2000. His history dissertation, "Making Theory: Producing Physics and Physicists in Postwar America," focuses on the establishment of theoretical physics in the United States after World War II, looking especially at how the post-war generation of graduate students was trained. His current project examines changes in the popularization of physics in this country during the 20th century. He has received fellowships from the National Science Foundation, as well as from the Mellon, Spencer and Whiting Foundations.
	Photo: Graham G. Ramsay Joshua D. Sosin, an assistant professor in the History Faculty, specializes in the ancient economy, history from documents and political and social satire. He took a BA (summa cum laude) in Latin from Mary Washington College in 1994 and a PhD in 2000 in classical studies from Duke University. His dissertation, "Perpetual Endowments in the Hellenistic World: A Case-Study in Economic Rationalism," reconstructs the rise and development of the perpetual endowment in the fourth-through-first centuries BCE. Sosin’s current research principally expands this work into the broader realm of public and private investment strategy in antiquity, but also pursues topics in the transmission and reception of Roman satire in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
	Photo: Frans Verdonk  William Uricchio is a professor in the Comparative Media Studies Program and holds a joint appointment in the Literature Faculty and in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section. He received his PhD in cinema studies from New York University in 1982 and comes to MIT from the Institute for Media and Re/Presentation at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, where he was department chair. He currently directs a five-year cultural identity project in the European Science Foundation Changing Media Changing Europe initiative. His broader research considers the transformation of media technologies into media practices, in particular, their role in (re-)constructing representation, knowledge and publics. His current focus centers on the implications of technologies such as the telephone and telegraph to time-based media, ranging from film to the computer. A Fulbright and Humboldt fellow, Uricchio has published widely on early television, early cinema and their emergence as cultural forms, including Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (1993), Die Anfänge des deutschen Fernsehens: Kritische Annäherungen an die Entwicklung bis 1945 (1993), The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (1991), and "The Nickel Madness": The Struggle to Control New York City’s Nickelodeons in 1907–1913 (forthcoming).
	Photo: Graham G. Ramsay  Muhamet Yildiz, an assistant professor in the Economics Department, specializes in economic theory. He obtained BSc degrees, one in electrical engineering and another in mathematics, in 1992, as well as an MA in economics in 1994, from Bogazici University in Turkey. He received his PhD in business, with a specialization in economic policy and analysis, from Stanford University this year. His dissertation, "Essays on Sequential Bargaining," uses game theory to answer the question: "When can two rational individuals reach an agreement, though they have incompatible beliefs about who will bring which advantages to the bargaining table?" His research interests include game theory, political economy and financial markets.
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Copyright © 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Spring 2001