Current Research

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Faculty Research Descriptions

Prof. Anne McCants, E51-293, x8-6669, amccants@mit.edu

Employs economic and quantitative approaches to the study of the European past, and has embarked on a project to study the various economic dimensions of cathedral building in the high middle ages. Will be trying to reconstruct where possible the financial underpinning and timing of Gothic cathedral construction in the Paris Basin, Norman England and elsewhere in France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia. The project will also assess the social overhead capital embodied in cathedral building and seek to make welfare assessments for this type of expenditure versus other possible investment or consumption opportunities.

Prof. Jeff Ravel, E51-179, x3-4451, ravel@mit.edu

French political culture from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Current projects include the digitization of the daily receipts registers of the Comédie-Française theater troupe in Paris from 1680 to 1800, in conjunction with MIT's HyperStudio; and the cultural, social, economic, and political aspects of fraud and deception in France from the Old Regime to the nineteenth century.

Prof. Elizabeth Wood, E51-282, x3-3255, elizwood@mit.edu

Author of two books on politics and culture in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, Professor Wood is now working on a project on the performance of politics in contemporary Russia under Vladimir Putin, drawing on insights from her work in that earlier era of Soviet history. She is looking for a UROP student to do research in an enormous database of Russian newspapers today to obtain information about images of Putin that are being generated by central and regional authorities for mass consumption.