Spring 1999 Creative tensions New faculty Honors & awards Hidden gems       All issues This issue only Help   Soundings is a publication of the School of Humanities and Social Science at MIT Comments and questions to www-shss@mit.edu	Introducing new faculty Dante Anzolini J.D. Cain Joseph Dumit Jessica G.Riskin Emma Teng Lora Wildenthal
	The faculty roster of the School of Humanities and Social Science is expanding with an infusion of new talent and expertise. In the last issue of soundings we introduced half the new faces in our School. The other half is profiled here. Dante Anzolini comes to the Music and Theater Arts Section at MIT as assistant professor of music and music director of the MIT Symphony Orchestra. He graduated in orchestral conducting from Yale University School of Music in 1990 with an MMA"—with highest honors"—and in 1997 with a DMA. He worked as associate conductor of the Yale Contemporary Ensemble, conducting numerous world premieres and 20th-century works. In 1992, he received the C.D. Jackson Award at the Tanglewood Music Center. An active performer, Anzolini has given recitals as pianist and harpsichordist, participating in numerous chamber groups in Europe, the US and South America. He has conducted youth orchestras and taught conducting in several festivals in Brazil. In recent years, he has been coach and conductor at the Oper der Stadt Bonn in Germany and conductor with the Bern Stadttheater in Switzerland and has guest conducted various orchestras in Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania, Brazil and Argentina.
	J.D. Cain joins the Literature Faculty this year as a new assistant professor specializing in the Middle Ages and antiquity. He completed his PhD in English and comparative literature at Columbia University in 1998 and has published on cross-dressing and courtly culture in medieval Europe. His dissertation, "Polytexts: Political Poetics and the Culture of State Formation in Angevin England," explores the relationship between cultural production and the increasing centralization of political power in the 12th-century state. His research focuses primarily on issues related to gender and sexuality.
	Joseph Dumit is a new assistant professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society, specializing in the anthropology of neuroscience and popular culture facts. He received a BA in anthropology and philosophy from Rice University in 1989 and a PhD in consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1995. Before joining STS, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT and a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has co-edited two books, Cyborgs & Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies (1997) and Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots (1998), and is finishing his manuscript, Whose Brain Is This? PET Scans and Personhood in Biomedical America. His current research concerns new social movements around illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome, attention deficit disorder, multiple chemical sensitivity and Gulf War syndrome, as well as changing evaluations of scientific evidence in the US.
	Jessica G. Riskin is the Leo Marx Career Development Assistant Professor of the History and Culture of Science and Technology. She received her BA from Harvard University in history and science in 1988 and her PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. She was a Mellon Fellow, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow and a postdoctoral fellow in the History Department at Northwestern University and at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. Before coming to MIT, she was assistant professor of history at Iowa State University. Her research interests include early modern natural sciences and Enlightenment intellectual and cultural history. She is completing a book on natural and moral science in 18th-century France and beginning one on automata and ideas about automation, 1670-1830.
	Emma Teng is an assistant professor of Chinese Studies in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section. She received her PhD in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University in 1997. Her fields of research are Chinese colonial travel literature, Asian-American literature and Chinese women's studies. She teaches courses on Chinese literature and film, Asian American history, East Asian cultures and women's studies. Her publications include a book on Taiwan's international relations, articles in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Race, Gender and Class and The International History Review, and articles forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and Re/Collecting Asian America: Early Asian American Cultural History.
	Lora Wildenthal is a new assistant professor of history, specializing in modern Germany, European women and modern colonialism. She received a BA in history and German from Rice University in 1987 and a PhD in history from the University of Michigan in 1994. She has published several articles on German women, racial politics and colonialism and is completing a book, Female Culture: German Women in Colonial Politics, 1884-1945. Her next research project concerns human rights organizations in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949-1989, and their relationships to the East Bloc countries and the legacies of the Holocaust and Nuremberg Trials. Before coming to MIT, she taught for three years at Pitzer College and held a fellowship at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.     BACK TO TOP
Copyright © 2000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Spring 1999