New faculty appointments
Arthur Bahr joined the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of Literature. Bahr graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College with majors in English, French, and Medieval Studies. Following a Fulbright year studying medieval sagas in Iceland, he began doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied the literary culture of fourteenth-century London, examining how the structure of literary and legal compilations produced in the city comprised complex arguments about the proper nature of royal power and civic polity. After completing the PhD in 2006, he joined the English department of Haverford College as Visiting Assistant Professor.
Bahr's teaching interests include Chaucer, the works of the Pearl-poet, and medieval romance; medieval Icelandic sagas; Old English language and literature; and representations of medieval culture in later periods, from Spenser's Faerie Queene to current medieval-influenced subcultures. He enjoys teaching from a broad range of periods, including ancient Greek tragedy, early modern drama, and satiric writings of all kinds.
Natasha Dow Schull joined the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society. Last year, Schull was a postdoctoral fellow at NYU's International Center for Advanced Studies, and prior to that a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. Schull received the PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003, where she was the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Schull has recently completed a book based on her research among compulsive gamblers in Las Vegas and the engineers who design the slot machines they play. Machine Life: Control and Compulsion in Las Vegas will be published by Princeton University Press in 2008. In the past year Schull also completed a documentary film, BUFFET: All You Can Eat Las Vegas, exploring the links between excess and waste in American consumption. BUFFET has appeared in numerous film festivals and will screen on PBS later this year. Schull's current research project, supported by the National Science Foundation, explores the social dimensions of emerging knowledge in neuroscience, focusing in particular on neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, and addiction pharmacology. At MIT, she will offer courses on Technology and Experience and Neuroscience and Society.
Edward Flemming joined the MIT faculty this fall as Associate Professor of Linguistics. Flemming received the MA in Linguistics with Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1990, and the PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1995.
Flemming's primary research interests concern the ways in which the sound systems of languages are shaped by the nature of speech production and perception. He is currently working on the perceptual basis for cross-linguistic restrictions on permissible sequences of consonants. Flemming has recently published articles in Language and The Handbook of Speech Perception.
Anna Mikusheva joined the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. She specializes in time series econometrics and statistics. In 1998 she earned the BA in mathematics from Moscow State University in Russia. Three years later she earned the PhD in probability and statistics from Moscow State University. She received the PhD in economics from Harvard University in 2007.
Mikusheva's dissertation focuses on statistical inferences in econometric models with asymptotic discontinuities. She is currently working on developing correct inferences in models with persistence or in the presence of weak identification.
Nick Montfort joined the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor of digital media in the Writing and Humanistic Studies Program. He is now completing a PhD in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. He received the SM in media arts and sciences from MIT in 1998, where he studied at the Media Lab, and the MA in creative writing from Boston University in 2001. Montfort received the BA in liberal arts and the BS in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995.
The digital media projects Montfort has undertaken include the blog Grand Text Auto, where he and five others write about computer narrative, poetry, games, and art; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; The Ed Report, a serialized novel written with William Gillespie; and the interactive fiction pieces Book and Volume, Ad Verbum, and Winchester's Nightmare. Montfort was co-editor of The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (The MIT Press, 2003). He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (The MIT Press, 2003), and co-wrote 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002). Montfort is now investigating narrative variation in interactive fiction, the human meanings and machine functions of code, and the role of platforms in creative computing. With Ian Bogost, he is currently working on a book called Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform.
Heather Paxson joined the MIT faculty this fall as Assistant Professor in Anthropology, after teaching at the Institute for four years as Lecturer. Prior to coming to MIT, Paxson taught at Pitzer College, New York University, Princeton University, and Stanford University. She received the BA from Haverford College in 1990 and the PhD in Anthropology from Stanford in 1998.
Paxson studies how people craft ethical senses of self through everyday activities to do with reproduction and food. Her first book, Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece (University of California Press, 2004), tracks recent transformations in Athenians' gendered experience and moral personhood through an ethnographic exploration of their use of fertility control technologies: contraception, abortion, and in vitro fertilization. Turning to work in the United States, her current research, located at the intersection of food politics and agricultural politics, examines the sentiments and cultural-economic conditions behind a current renaissance in American artisan and farmstead cheesemaking, particularly in Vermont and Wisconsin. Paxson's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Bradford Skow joined the MIT faculty in 2007 as Assistant Professor of Philosophy. For the past two years, Skow was Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He recently won the Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholars Prize. Skow received the BA from Oberlin College in 1998, the MA in Philosophy from the University of Sydney in 1999, and the PhD from New York University in 2005.
Skow's research focuses on the nature of space, time, and geometry in classical and relativistic physics. He has also written on modality and possible worlds and on the connection between time and rationality.
