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Capozzola, Christopher

capozzol@mit.edu
Assistant Professor of History

Professor Capozzola's research focuses on the political and cultural history of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a special interest in the impact of war on American everyday life.

He received a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2002, and has taught at Columbia University and Middlebury College. His dissertation, "Uncle Sam Wants You: Political Obligations in World War I America," examined the political and social history of homefront mobilization in the United States.

Dower, John


Elting E. Morison Professor of History (History)

Professor Dower received a B.A. in American Studies from Amherst College in 1959, and a Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University in 1972. Before joining the MIT faculty he taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1972-1986) and the University of California, San Diego (1986-1992). A specialist in Japanese history and U.S.-East Asian relations, he has devoted particular attention to issues of war and peace, racism, memory, and representations of self and other in popular illustrations and films.

His books include Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience (1979), War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986); collected essays under the title Japan in War and Peace (1994); and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999) which was honored with numerous prizes including the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and National Book Award.

Howe, James

jhowe@mit.edu
Professor and Head of the Anthropology Program

Professor Howe received a B.A. degree from Harvard College (1966), an M.A. from Oxford University (Social Anthropology, 1967) and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (Anthropology, 1974). He carries out research in political and historical anthropology, indigenous-state relations, and missionization. His publications include The Kuna Gathering: Contemporary Village Politics in Panama (1986), and A People Who Would Not Kneel: Panama, the United States, and the San Blas Kuna (1998).

Jackson, Jean

jjackson@mit.edu
Professor and Head of the Anthropology Program

Professor Jackson received her B.A. from Wellesley College (Anthropology/Sociology, 1965), and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University (Medical Anthropology, 1966; Anthropology, 1972). She has been at MIT since 1972. She has been examining social and ethnic identity among indigenous populations of the Northwest Amazon since 1968, in 1983 publishing The Fish People: Linguistic Exogamy and Tukanoan Identity in Northwest Amazonia. A volume co-edited with Kay Warren, Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation and the State in Latin America, was published in 2002.

She has also carried out research on gender, the epistemology of ethnography, and, for the last seventeen years, chronic pain. "Camp Pain": Talking with Chronic Pain Patients, based on NIMH-funded research in an in-patient pain center in New England, was published in 2000.

Jacobs, Meg

mjacobs@mit.edu
Assistant Professor of American History (History)

Professor Jacobs's areas of focus include politics, culture, and business history. She received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1990 and her Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia in 1998. Her book manuscript, "The Politics of Purchasing Power," explores the intersection of state development, consumer culture and American politics in the New Deal and World War II.

Khoury, Philip

khoury@mit.edu
Professor of History and Kenan Sahin Dean, School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (History)

Professor Khoury received his B.A. from Trinity College in 1971 and his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 1980. His publications include Syria and the French Mandate (1987), which received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association, Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (1991), and The Modern Middle East: A Reader (1993). His current research is focused on war and society in the 20th century Middle East. Professor Khoury is Past President of the Middle East Studies Association.

Maier, Pauline

pmaier@mit.edu
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History (History)

Professor Maier received her B.A. in American History and Literature at Radcliffe College (1960) and her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University (1968). She has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and served as the Cardozo Visiting Professor of History at Yale.

Her research is primarily concerned with the American Revolution and its impact. She is the author of From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Resistance to Britain (Knopf, 1972); The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (Knopf, 1980); The American People: A History (a junior-high-school textbook; D.C. Heath and Co., 1985), and American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Knopf, 1997), which was on the New York Times Book Review editors' list of the best eleven books, fiction and nonfiction, of 1997, and nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award in nonfiction.

More recently she wrote the first eight chapters, spanning the period from the first human habitation of the Americas to the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, for a new AAmerican History textbook, Inventing America (W.W. Norton and Co., 2002). She also contributed to several historical television series both for the History Channel and PBS, including "Liberty! The American Revolution" and "The Biography of America," and is beginning work on a book about the ratification of the federal Constitution that is under contract to Simon and Schuster.

Mazlish, Bruce

bmazlish@mit.edu
Professor (History)

Professor Mazlish received his B.A. from Columbia College (1944) and Ph.D. from Columbia University (1955), in Modern European History. He has taught at the University of Maine, Columbia University, and, since 1955, MIT. His areas of interest are Western intellectual and cultural history, with a special nod to history of science and technology; the culture of capitalism; and history of the social sciences. His most recent publications are The Uncertain Sciences (1998), The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (1993), and A New Science: The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology (1989). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress Scholars' Council.

Perdue, Peter

pcperdue@mit.edu
T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilzations (History) and Director of Graduate Studies of the Doctoral Program in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology

Professor Perdue received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (History, 1970; East Asian Studies, 1973; and History and East Asian Languages, 1981). He is the author of Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850 A.D. (1987), and several articles, including "The Qing State and the Gansu Grain Market, 1739-1864," "Technological Determinism in Agriculture," and "Military Mobilization in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century China, Russia, and Mongolia."

His research interests lie in modern Chinese and Japanese social and economic history. He is a recipient of the 1988 Edgerton Award and a past holder of the Ford Interna- tional Career Development Chair. He was awarded the James A. Levitan Prize and he is currently writing a book on the Chinese conquest of Central Asia from 1680 to 1760.

Ritvo, Harriet

hnritvo@mit.edu
Arthur J. Conner Professor of History and Head of the History Faculty (History)

Professor Ritvo received her B.A. (1968) and her Ph.D. (1975) from Harvard University; she also studied at the Cambridge University. Her research interests include environmental history, British cultural history, history of human-animal relations, and the history of natural history. Her research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center; she has also received a Whiting Writer's Award.

She is the author of The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (1997), and of The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987). Professor Ritvo is currently a senior fellow at the National Humanities Center.

Silbey, Susan S

ssilbey@mit.edu
Professor of Sociology and Anthropology (Anthropology)

Professor Silbey received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and post-graduate training in enthnography in the Sociology Department of Brandeis University. She served as editor of Studies in Law, Politics and Society (1990-1997), and the Law & Society Review (1998-2000). Silbey is the past president of the Law & Society Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In 1998, she published The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life describing the ways in which Americans imagine, use, and construct the rule of law.

Recent publications include, "Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative;" "Let Them Eat Cake: Globalization, Postmodern Colonialism and the Possibilities of Justice;" and "The Architecture of Authority: the Place of Law in the Space of Science."

Her current research projects include a study of the invention of an environmental management system for research laboratories, the role of gender in research organizations, and a comparative analysis of two new engineering colleges.

Slyomovics, Susan

ssly@mit.edu
Genevieve McMillan-Reba Stewart Professor of the Study of Women in the Developing World (Anthropology)

Susan Slyomovics is the author of The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Epic Poet in Performance (1988) and The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (1998), winner of the 1999 Albert Hourani Book Award given by the Middle East Studies Association, and the 1999 Chicago Folklore Prize; co-editor of Women and Power in the Middle East (2001) and editor of The Walled Arab City in Literature, Architecture and History: The Living Medina in the Maghrib (2001).

Her areas of research and teaching are the expressive culture of the Middle East and North Africa, gender studies, the overlap between oral and written literature, approaches to hybrid literatures and bilingualism, and the relationship between visual anthropology and literature.

Wood, Elizabeth

elizwood@mit.edu
Associate Professor (History)

Professor Wood received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College in Russian History and Literature in 1980, and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Russian and Soviet History in 1991.

Her research interests are primarily focused on the 1920s in Soviet Russia with attention to women's history, cultural history and political history. In 1996 she received the Levitan Prize for her research on political trials performed as plays in workers' and student clubs from 1920-1933. Her first book, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (1997) was published by Indiana University Press. Her current book manuscript is entitled "Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Revolutionary Russia, 1920-1933" (forthcoming). Currently, Professor Wood is the Director of Women's Studies at MIT.

Yates, JoAnne

jyates@mit.edu
Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management

Professor Yates received her B.A. from Texas Christian University and her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She studies communication and information as they shape and are shaped by technologies, ideologies, and work practices over time, using both historical and rhetorical/social scientific methods. Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (1989; 1993) covered the period from 1850 to 1920.

Her current historical project focuses on the life insurance industry's adoption and use of information technology in the 20th century. In addition to her general interest in business history, she collaborates with Wanda Orlikowski on studies of communication and work practices around electronic media in contemporary organizations, focusing on genres and temporal patterns of communication.