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Sandy Alexandre joined the MIT faculty in the fall of 2005 as Assistant Professor of Literature, and teaches 19th and 20th-century American and African-American Literature. Alexandre received the BA from Dartmouth College in 1997 and the PhD in English Language & Literature from the University of Virginia in 2005. From August 2003 to August 2005 she was a predoctoral fellow under the auspices of the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies.
Alexandre's research focuses on the interrelationship of literature, racial violence, and (environmental) space. For example, in the book that she is currently working on, she demonstrates the ways in which works of fiction, poetry, and visual art employ the language of dispossession and unsettlement (whether implicitly or explicitly) to articulate the sociopolitical effects of lynching violence on black Americans. Writers she examines include James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison. Her second book project will interrogate the ways in which black-American writers of the 19th and 20th centuries engage the nature/culture divide and have consequently attempted to develop their own taxonomy of Romanticism.
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Alisa Kim Braithwaite joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of Literature. She received the PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard in the spring of 2006, and the BA with High Honors from Barnard College in 1998. She spent her final year of dissertation writing at Northeastern University as a Northeast Consortium Dissertation Scholar.
Braithwaite's research focuses on
the works of Anglophone Caribbean women writers, such as Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, and Michelle Cliff. Her dissertation explored how these women used their novels to depict the process of a black woman becoming a critical reader and a revolutionary writer, and how these novels act as critiques of the patriarchal and neo-colonial norms that have attempted to inhibit the development of the black woman as artist and intellectual. Her present work continues her interest in the black woman as artist/intellectual. She is currently investigating the works of Audre Lorde and Paule Marshall, examining the ways in which these writers reshape conventional notions of cosmopolitanism.
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Sarah Brouillette joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of Literature, specializing in contemporary postcolonial, British, and Irish writing. Her research concerns the relationships between new literatures and the forces of political and economic globalization. Brouillette is completing a book on the implications for writers of the global expansion of publishing markets via transnational media corporations. Concurrent work assesses the UK's creative industries, as part of a global trend toward regional dependence on heritage-based initiatives for economic development, devoting special attention to the volatile and violent heritage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Brouillette grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and received the BA with Honors from Simon Fraser University. After receiving the PhD in English and Book History from the University of Toronto in 2005, she was the Fred L. Emerson Faculty Fellow at Syracuse University, and will soon take up a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship at the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Culture Heritage.
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Panle Jia joins the MIT faculty this fall as an Assistant Professor of Economics. Jia received the BA with distinction from Fudan University in 1997 and the PhD in Economics from Yale University in 2006.
Jia's research focuses on three main topics: the effect of firm entry on market structure, the welfare consequences of patent regulation, and the application of new estimation techniques to empirical studies. She has studied the impact of chain stores on small retailers, and the welfare impact of TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) on developing countries' pharmaceutical industries. Currently, she is working on extending the traditional econometric estimation procedure to make inference in cases when the identified set contains multiple elements.
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Orit Kedar joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of Political Science. Kedar received the BA in Political Science and Economics from Tel Aviv University in 1994, the MA in Political Science from Brown University in 1998, and the PhD in Political Science from Harvard University in 2003.
Kedar's principal field of research
is comparative politics of developed democracies, with a focus on electoral politics, the interaction of behavior and institutions, party systems, electoral systems, parliamentary politics, and European integration. Other interests include multilevel explanations in comparative politics, federalism, representation, questions of identity, social choice, and spatial models of voting. Kedar comes to MIT from the University of Michigan, where she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science and affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research and Center for European Studies. She was also a member of the Parties Research Group at UM. Her work appeared in such venues as the American Political Science Review, Electoral Studies, and Political Analysis. Kedar teaches courses about comparative politics, and particularly about comparative electoral politics, parliamentary democracy, elections in Europe, and European integration. Kedar will be on leave from MIT for 2006-2007, and will be on campus beginning in fall 2007.
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Vincent-Antonin Lepinay joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Lepinay received the BA from the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1999 and the PhD in the anthropology of science from the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris in 2003. He also received the MA in sociology from Columbia University in 2004.
Lepinay's dissertation examined the diffusion of mathematics on financial markets. He is currently working on personal banking issues in the current stem cell controversy, and on a comparison of personal bankruptcy regulations in the U.S. and France.
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Gabriel Lenz joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of Political Science. Lenz graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College in 1999, and received the PhD from Princeton University in 2006.
Lenz studies American politics,
with a focus on campaigns and elections, political psychology, and public opinion. Although his research centers on American politics, his work often strays into other countries, especially Canada and Britain, and into methodology, especially research design and quantitative methods.
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Keeril Makan joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of Music. For the past two years, Makan has been an Assistant Professor in the Composition/Theory Division at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 2000 through 2001, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Helsinki, Finland, and from 2002 through 2004, he was a Ladd Prize recipient from the University of California, Berkeley for study in Paris, France. Makan received the BM in Music Composition from Oberlin Conservatory in 1994, the BA in Religion from Oberlin College in 1994, and the PhD in Music Composition from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004.
Makan's music has been performed extensively both nationally and internationally by ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. Among his prizes and commission awards are those from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, Carnegie Hall, Meet the Composer/Commissioning Music USA, the Gerbode and Hewlett Foundations, and the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard.
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Haimanti Roy joins the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of History. Roy received the BA from Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1996, the MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 1998, and the PhD from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio in 2006. She specializes in the political and social history of South Asia in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on issues of citizenship and identity formations after the Partition of India in 1947. She has held a Social Science Research Council Pre-Dissertation Fellowship in Bangladesh and a Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship and a William Howard Taft Fellowship at the University of Cincinnati.
Roy's dissertation, Citizenship and National Identity in Post-Partition Bengal, 1947-65, examines the evolution of trans-territorial identities in India and East Pakistan (Bangladesh). She is interested in issues related to nationalism, colonialism, decolonization, gender, and refugee movements in South Asia. At MIT, she teaches courses which aim to both introduce South Asian history to the non-specialist as well as critically focus on specific themes such as religion, politics, women, citizenship, and visual media in the South Asian context.
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David Andrew Singer joined the
MIT faculty this summer as Assistant Professor in the Political Science department. Professor Singer studies international political economy, with a focus on international financial regulation, the influence of global capital flows on government policymaking, international institutions and governance, and the political economy of central banking. His research appears in the journal International Organization as well as a forthcoming book, Regulating Capital: Setting Standards for the International Financial System (under contract with Cornell University Press). His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.
Professor Singer is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Harvard University, where he received the PhD in 2004. Before joining the MIT faculty, he was Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame (2004-2006), and also worked in corporate finance and technology venture development.
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Roger White joins the MIT faculty
this fall as Associate Professor (with tenure) in Philosophy. For the past six years, White has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. White received the BA from the University of New South Wales, Australia in 1994, and the PhD in Philosophy from MIT in 2000.
White's research spans traditional epistemology and epistemological issues in the philosophy of science. He has published on the assessment of arguments for radical skepticism, various applications of probability theory to reasoning, and the role of explanatory considerations in inductive reasoning. Current interests include foundational questions concerning the nature of epistemology. His main current project involves expanding his work on explanatory considerations in epistemology.
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