People

Adam Albright received his BA in linguistics from Cornell University in 1996 and his Ph.D. in linguistics from UCLA in 2002. He was a Faculty Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 2002-2004, and is currently a Professor at MIT. His research interests include phonology, morphology, and learnability, with an emphasis on using computational modeling and experimental techniques to investigate issues in phonological theory. Other interests include: Yiddish phonology and morphology; Lakhota phonology and morphology (and many other topics in Lakhota); and the proper treatment of historical change within Optimality Theory.

Read more about Adam here.

Arthur Bahr studies medieval literature, and especially enjoys reading old books as if they were poems: that is, for how their constituent parts (texts and pages of a manuscript, like lines and stanzas of a poem) work together to create a whole that is more interesting than any of those parts would be in isolation. More fancily put, he blends formalist and materialist approaches in order to find literary resonance in the physical particularities of medieval manuscripts. Arthur can also be found serving as a National judge with the United States Figure Skating Association; undertaking long, involved, and sometimes overly ambitious cooking projects; and listening to Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, various Icelandic bands (m√∫m, Of Monsters and Men, amiina), and a wide range of baroque opera. He misses his much-loved, recently departed cat Alcina very much, and he wants the world to know that he was devoted to Betty White long before she was all the rage.

Read more about Arthur here.

Tristan G. Brown is the S.C. Fang Chinese Language and Culture Career Development Professor and a historian of late imperial (“early modern”) China at MIT. His research focuses on the ways in which law, science, environment, and religion interacted in China from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. 

Learn more about Tristan here.

Alex Byrne teaches in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (in the philosophy half of the department), where he is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy. Alex’s main interests are the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of sex and gender. Alex lives in Cambridge with his wife Carole (who, unlike him, has appeared on Joe Rogan), their son Griffin, and cat Lola.

A favorite book is the 1954 novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, which skewers the pretensions of academia, along with much else. Alex’s musical tastes are unfortunately preserved in 1970’s amber (e.g. Fragile, by the English progressive rock group Yes).

Learn more about Alex here.

William Deringer is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society. His research examines the history of those techniques and technologies of calculation that organize modern economic, financial, and political life. His work ranges widely across time, from early compound-interest tables and changing social relations in the English countryside in the early 1600s, to the place of computer spreadsheets in the culture of Wall Street in the “go-go” 1980s. Before graduate school, Will was an investment banking analyst at the Blackstone Group in New York. 

Learn more about Will here.

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Chaire, Pauvreté et politiques publiques at the Collège de France. In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of people living in poverty, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies. She has worked on health, education, financial inclusion, environment and governance.

A piece of music she loves is Bach’s Goldberg Variations: BWV 988.

Learn more about Esther here.

Sally Haslanger is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT.  She has published in metaphysics, epistemology, feminist theory, and critical race theory.  Broadly speaking, her work links issues of social justice with contemporary work in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Recently, Sally has been working on social practices, social structure, structural explanation with an emphasis on the materiality of social practices and the role of ideology.  In addition to her research on social justice, Sally is deeply committed to promoting diversity in philosophy and beyond. 

Sally’s favorite piece of artwork is the poem “Under One Small Star.” They wrote a piece on why this poem speaks to their struggle to do justice to all the wonderful things in the world, which you can find here.

Learn more about Sally here.

Thomas Levenson is a Professor of Science Writing at MIT. Tom has written five books on science and the history of science and has produced, directed, written, and executive produced several science documentaries. He blogs at The Inverse Square Blog and Balloon Juice, and his short-form writing has appeared in a wide range of newspapers, magazines, and digital publications. Tom earned his bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard and now lives about three miles from the scenes of his undergraduate indiscretions with his wife, Katha Seidman, and the apple of his eye, Henry.

His favorite piece of artwork is J.M.W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire. According to Tom, it’s one of the greatest artistic expressions of the wrenching transformation  of the industrial revolution.

Learn more about Tom here.

Anne McCants is Ann F. Friedlaender Professor of History and Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, where she directs the Concourse Program for the integration of humanistic study with the science core. Her research and teaching interests lie in the economic and social history of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe, as well as in the application of social science research methods across the disciplines. Anne’s research projects span multiple centuries of European economic development but are all grounded in a common concern to better understand the standard of living in the past and those features of economic and social life that contribute to human welfare.

Her choice of influential book, first read in 2nd or 3rd grade and reread as recently as the late 2010s, is Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery in 1908, along with its sequels.

She says: “This book (and subsequent) taught me about the power of kindness to overcome loneliness, about ways to navigate being a misfit or an outsider with cheer and grace, about the power of a hopeful imagination to overcome setbacks and disappointment, about the virtue of standing up for yourself and the peril of holding grudges. Most of all it taught me about the power of love to make a difference in a small corner of the world but in ways that changed lives. It also showed me how to grow up at a time when I was doing just that myself. This is not a story to be watched in a sentimentalized movie or TV show aimed at kids. This is a book to be read in its original early 20th century voice. I’ve read plenty of deeper and more profound things since, but none that informed the shaping of my character so fully. And I don’t think I ended up studying an orphanage for my dissertation by accident!”

Learn more about Anne here.

Linda Rabieh is a Senior Lecturer in Concourse and joined the Concourse faculty in 2010. For the past six years, Linda has been a co-director of the joint History/Concourse IAP in Ancient Greece and IAP in Ancient and Medieval Italy trips. Her research and teaching interests involve ancient and medieval treatments of ethics in war, the role of women in ancient thought, and the ancient Greek inquiry into the extent and limits of knowledge. She loves to discuss movies, books, politics—really pretty much anything, and she will almost never say no to coffee, olives, or dancing. She is an adopted and devoted Cantabrigian, where she lives with her husband and their two kids.

Learn more about Linda here.

Emily Richmond Pollock is an Associate Professor of Music. Emily’s research focuses particularly on conservatism, the historicization of modernist musical value, operatic institutions, and the relationship between modern musical style and convention. Emily joined Music and Theater Arts in 2012 and regularly teaches 21M.011 Introduction to Western Music and courses on opera, the twentieth century, and the symphonic repertoire, as well as the Advanced Seminar for music majors. She is currently the music major advisor and has served in the past as a Burchard Faculty Fellow and as an advisor to first-years and music concentrators. She remains an active amateur oboist, performing with the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra and the Mercury Orchestra. She lives in Belmont with her partner Andy, her son Jonah, and their rabbit, Figaro (Figgy).

Emily’s favorite pieces of artwork are both operas: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which uses the interplay language and music in a way which inspired her interest in opera, and Puccini’s Tosca, which she usually says is her favorite opera now.

Learn more about Emily here.

Rebecca Saxe is the John W. Jarve (1978) Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Associate Dean of Science at MIT. Her research involving adults, children, and infants not only expands the junction of sociology and neuroscience, but also unravels—and gives clarity to—the social threads that form the fabric of society. She aspires to use cognitive neuroscience to understand human thought and motivation, and to be humble, uncompromising, and constructive. Rebecca is Canadian, born and raised in Toronto. The luckiest thing in her career has been finding incredible mentors, three brilliant and fearless women: Kia Nobre (undergrad), Nancy Kanwisher (grad), and Susan Carey (postdoc). In addition to excellence in research, she deeply values her roles as a teacher and a mentor. She wants to foment chances for passionate people to participate in serious intellectual conversations, with high standards and high stakes and no holds barred. She believes such conversations are fundamentally what a university is for. Rebecca has two young kids, both of whom attend Spanish immersion public school in Cambridge.

Learn more about Rebecca here.

Robin Wolfe Scheffler is an Associate Professor in the Science, Technology, and Society Program and  historian of the modern biological and biomedical sciences and their intersections with developments in American history. He is currently working on a project that follows the history of cancer virus research in the twentieth century from legislature to laboratory, documenting its origins and impact on the modern biological sciences. His other projects include the history of the biotechnology industry and a chemical biography of dioxins. The common goal of Robin’s projects is to understand the mutual influence of science on society and of society on science.

Learn more about Robin here.

Susan Silbey was for 26 years a professor of sociology, and, for the last 18 years, has been a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Anthropology faculty, 9 as department head. There, she holds the position of Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Sociology and Anthropology. She also teaches in the Sloan School of Management in the Work and Organizational Studies Group. Across this time and these disciplines, her scholarship has been exactly the same: she studies how law works. For these 40 years, her research has explored how law (as text, organizational practices, and historic institution) develops in response to the demands and contributions of ordinary citizens, how law is made from the bottom up. 

Susan values deeply two pieces of music: Miles Davis’ album “Kind of Blue” and Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien.” She wrote a paper/set of responses to a colleague’s book based upon Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue: Silbey, Susan S., and Patricia Ewick. “The Double Life of Reason and Law.” U. Miami L. Rev. 57 (2002): 497.

Learn more about Susan here and here.

Lily Tsai, Ford Professor of Political Science, was born in Stillwater, Oklahoma, then grew up in New Jersey. She is a scholar of governance, accountability, and political behavior and is engrossed by the strategies that ordinary people use to influence government authorities even in the absence of strong democratic institutions, how authorities and elites seek to influence and control the behavior of their constituents, and how to create public trust and trustworthiness that lead to constructive engagement and cooperation between citizens and government. At its core, Lily’s research seeks to understand when authorities provide what people need and want, and why they often fail to do so. In particular, her work looks closely at what can be done to improve trust and cooperation, and how to increase the motivation of authorities to respond to citizen needs. Lily founded the MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB) in 2016 to respond to students who seek an active role in solving public problems and engaging in civic life, while also producing rigorous scientific research. Outside of social science and governance innovation, Lily enjoys running (though her knees now require her to run shorter distances), practicing the piano, and hiking. Big Sur and the Aletsch Glacier are two of her favorite places to visit.

One of Lily’s favorite short stories is “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien.

Learn more about Lily here.

Gerardo Berlanga Molina (2025) studies course 2 (Mechanical Engineering). His favorite piece of art is Rembrandt van Rijn’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633.

Enoch Ellis (2026) studies courses 10 (Chemical Engineering) and 18 (Mathematics). His favorite book is All About Love by bell hooks.

Gabbie Girard (2025) studies course 15 (Business Analytics). Her favorite piece of art is the B-side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road!

Siddhu Pachipala (2027) studies course 17 (Political Science) and 14 (Economics). His favorite book is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt.

Sam Salwan (2025) studies course 6 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), 14 (Economics), and 17 (Political Science). Their favorite piece of literature is ‘The Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka.

Akua Yeboah (2027) studies course 6-9 (Computation and Cognition). A book she will forever cherish is Tenth of December by George Saunders.