MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences soundings
Fall 2004 [ Previous issues ]
Adam Albright
Will Broadhead
David Ciarlo
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Adam Albright
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Will Broadhead
Below:
David Ciarlo

Aden Evens
M. Taylor Fravel
Mikhail Golosov
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Aden Evens
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M. Taylor Fravel
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Mikhail Golosov
Richard Holton
Erica Caple James
Rae Langton
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Richard Holton
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Erica Caple James
Below:
Rae Langton

Guido Lorenzoni
Lily Tsai
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Guido Lorenzoni Below:
Lily Tsai

New faculty

Adam Albright joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of Linguistics. He specializes in phonology, with an emphasis on using computational modeling and psycholinguistic experimentation to investigate issues in phonological theory. Albright received the BA from Cornell University, and the PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2002. From 2002–2004, he was a Faculty Fellow in the Linguistics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Albright's dissertation, "The Identification of Bases in Morphological Paradigms," develops a computational model of how language learners cope with incomplete data about words, and how they identify the dominant patterns of their language. He has recently had articles published in the journals Language and Cognition.

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Will Broadhead joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of History. He received the BA from Middlebury College in 1995, and the PhD in Ancient History in 2002 from University College London. He specializes in the history of Italy in the age of the Roman Republic, with a particular interest in the period from the later 4th to the early 1st century BC. Broadhead is currently preparing a book based on his dissertation, examining the role of geographical mobility in Italy and its impact on Rome's efforts to control the territory of the peninsula in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Before moving to MIT in 2004, he taught at the University of Bristol. His publications include articles and reviews in The Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Cahiers Glotz, and The Classical Review, and a chapter on colonization in the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the Roman Army.

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David Ciarlo joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of History. A Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT in 2003–2004, he specializes in the social and cultural history of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on imperialism. Ciarlo received the BA from Oberlin College in 1990, the MA from the University of Cincinnati in 1994, and the PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003. He has held a Fulbright Fellowship in Berlin and the Merle Curti Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ciarlo's dissertation, "Consuming Race, Envisioning Empire: Colonialism and German Mass Culture, 1885–1914," explores the interconnections of imperialism and racism with commercial imagery in Germany, particularly in turn-of-the-century advertising and product packaging.

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Aden Evens joins the SHASS faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of Technical Communications in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. Like many of his new colleagues, he is a committed interdisciplinarian, with research and teaching interests ranging over philosophy, music, technology, and media studies, as well as writing. After receiving the AB from Harvard University in Philosophy and Mathematics, Aden began the PhD in Philosophy at McGill University, but completed his doctorate outside of any department, on the ethics of French theorist Gilles Deleuze. A fellowship at the Pembroke Center at Brown University supported the completion of a book, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience (University of Minnesota Press, Spring 2005).

Aden comes to MIT from the Expository Writing Program at Harvard, where he has been teaching courses about digital culture. His current research project is Interface, a book on the possibilities and limits of creativity in digital technologies.

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M. Taylor Fravel is Assistant Professor of Political Science at MIT. In the past academic year, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. He studies international relations, with a focus on international security, China and East Asia. Taylor has published articles in Foreign Affairs, The China Quarterly, Armed Forces & Society, Asian Survey, Current History, as well as in edited volumes. He is currently completing a book manuscript that examines China's settlement of territorial disputes since 1949 by comparing strategies of cooperation with coercion.

Taylor received the BA from Middlebury College in 1993, the MA from the University of Oxford in 1995, the MSc from the London School of Economics in 1996, and the PhD from Stanford University in 2003. He also has graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

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Mikhail Golosov joins the MIT faculty as Assistant Professor of Economics. Golosov received the BA in Economics from Belarus State Economic University in 1998, the MA from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1999, and the PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2004. For the last three years Golosov worked at the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Golosov's research interests primarily lie in macroeconomics, public finance, and monetary policy. Golosov's dissertation examines the optimal design of social insurance programs, such as Disability Insurance or Social Security. He analyzes how such programs can provide the right incentives to productive people to continue working while guaranteeing insurance to those who lose income due to illness, unemployment or old age. Golosov recently published an article entitled "Optimal Indirect and Capital Taxation" in the Review of Economic Studies.

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Richard Holton joins the MIT faculty this fall as Professor of Philosophy. He works in a wide range of areas, including philosophy of language, metaphysics and philosophy of law. His main focus in recent years has been in moral psychology: issues of free will, choice, weakness of will, and will power.

Holton graduated from the University of Oxford in 1984, having read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He was a graduate student at Nuffield College, Oxford (1984–1985), and the Ecole normale supérieur, Paris (1985–1986), before receiving the PhD in Philosophy at Princeton in 1995. He taught at Monash University, Melbourne (1990–1996), was a research fellow in the Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University (1997–1998), and then taught at Sheffield University (1998–1999), and the University of Edinburgh (1999–2004), where he chaired the Philosophy Department.

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Erica Caple James joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. James received the PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University (2003) with a focus on medical and psychiatric anthropology, the anthropology of gender, religion and healing, and issues of race, human rights, and democracy. Her doctoral research, funded through a Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, examines the international, national and local responses to the needs of Haitian victims of human rights violations targeted during the 1991–1994 coup period. Her dissertation, "The Violence of Misery: 'Insecurity' in Haiti in the 'Democratic' Era," looks at the psychosocial experience of Haitian torture survivors and the politics of humanitarian assistance in so-called "post-conflict" nations making the transition to democracy.

James received the MTS from Harvard Divinity School in 1995, and the AB from Princeton University (1992). During 2003–2004 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and a Visiting Scholar in the MIT Anthropology Program.

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Rae Langton joins the MIT faculty this fall as Professor of Philosophy. Her areas of interest include the history of philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. Her book on Kant, entitled Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. She is currently working on a volume of new and reprinted essays about pornography and objectification, entitled Sexual Solipsism.

Langton graduated from the University of Sydney in 1986 and completed the PhD at Princeton in 1995. She has taught at Monash University (1990–1996), and was a fellow in the Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University (1997–1998). She moved to the UK to teach at Sheffield University (1998–1999). She became the first woman to be a professor of philosophy in Scotland when she was appointed to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1999.

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Guido Lorenzoni joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of Economics. A native of Rome, Lorenzoni received the BA from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1994, the MA in Economics from the University Pompeu Fabra in 1997, and the PhD in Economics from MIT in 2001. Lorenzoni specializes in macroeconomics and international economics. His thesis, which was completed in June 2001, is entitled, "Essays on Liquidity Provision in Macroeconomics." In "Imperfect Information, Consumers' Expectations and The Business Cycle," Lorenzoni studies cyclical fluctuations that arise when agents endowed with different pieces of information try to learn the long-run equilibrium of the economy.

An assistant professor at Princeton from 2001–2004, Lorenzoni also worked as a research fellow at the Ente Luigi Einaudi for Monetary Studies, Rome in 2003. In 2002, he was a visiting scholar in the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

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Lily Tsai is Assistant Professor of Political Science at MIT. Her research focuses on issues of accountability, governance, and state development. Her dissertation, "The Informal State: Accountability and Public Goods Provision in Rural China," examines the puzzle of why government officials in non-democratic systems where accountability is weak ever provide more than the bare minimum of public goods needed to maintain social stability. Preliminary findings from this research were published in The China Journal (2002). Additional research and teaching interests include state-society relations, the development of informal and formal institutions, bureaucratic politics, the use of moral authority as a political resource, and Chinese politics.

Tsai received the BA in English and International Relations from Stanford University in 1996, the MA in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998, and the PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2004. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright program and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

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