 

Faculty

Press contact: Andrew Whitacre, awhit@mit.edu, 617-324-0490. Please use the MIT Directory for faculty’s current offices and phone numbers.


Our faculty is made up of some of the world’s best known media and writing scholars, teachers, and practitioners. From literature, civic media, digital media, design, and data visualization, to television, games, science fiction, and international pop culture, they are winners of Pulitzer Prizes, National Science Foundation CAREER Awards, and Peabody Awards, and recipients of countless grants and fellowships.

They are also some of the most accessible faculty members anywhere. If you would like to speak or meet with them, we encourage you to contact them.


Vivek Bald Vivek Bald
Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media
Director of CMS Graduate Studies
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Contact

vbald@mit.edu
Vivek Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His films include "Taxi-vala/Auto-biography," (1994) which explored the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and "Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music" (2003) a hybrid music documentary/social documentary about South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. Bald is currently working on a transmedia project aimed at recovering the histories of peddlers and steamship workers from British colonial India who came to the United States under the shadows of anti-Asian immigration laws and settled within U.S. communities of color in the early 20th century. The project consists of the Bengali Harlem book as well as a documentary film, “In Search of Bengali Harlem,” (currently in production), and a digital oral history website in development at bengaliharlem.com.
Marcia Bartusiak Marcia Bartusiak
Professor of the Practice Emeritus

bar2siak@mit.edu
Combining her training as a journalist with a graduate degree in physics, Marcia Bartusiak has been covering the fields of astronomy and physics for four decades and has published in a variety of publications, including Science, Smithsonian, Discover, National Geographic, Astronomy. and Natural History. Her latest books are Dispatches from Planet 3, a collection of cosmological essays, Black Hole: How An Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled on by Hawking Became Loved and The Day We Found the Universe, about the birth of modern cosmology in the 1920s, which was reviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a small wonder” and received the History of Science Society’s 2010 Davis Prize for best history of science book for the public.

Bartusiak has also written Thursday's Universe, a guide to the frontiers of astrophysics; Through a Universe Darkly, a history of astronomers' quest to discover the universe's composition; and Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony, a chronicle of the international attempt to detect cosmic gravity waves (which was updated and republished in the summer of 2017). Each was named a notable book by the New York Times. Another of her books, Archives of the Universe, a history of the major discoveries in astronomy told through 100 of the original scientific publications, is used in introductory astronomy courses across the nation. In 2006 Bartusiak received the prestigious Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics for her significant contributions to the cultural, artistic, and humanistic dimension of physics and in 2008 was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for “exceptionally clear communication of the rich history, the intricate nature, and the modern practice of astronomy to the public at large.”
Ian Condry Ian Condry
Professor

condry@mit.edu
Ian Condry s a cultural anthropologist of Japan and professor at MIT since 2002. He is the author of two books, Hip-Hop Japan and The Soul of Anime, both of which explore globalization from below. The books are available for free, thanks to Creative Commons and Duke University Press: mit.academia.edu/IanCondry.

In the fall of 2019, he launched the MIT Spatial Sound Lab, a community production studio for immersive, multiperspective, sonic experimentation. Among the goals is to provide a space for using sound to disrupt hierarchies, reduce inequalities, and cross borders. He is co-organizer of Dissolve Music, a sound conference and music festival, in 2018 and 2020 (mitdissolve.com).

Since 2018, he is the radio DJ for Near and Far, a Japanese hip-hop show, on WMBR 88.1FM Cambridge, and online at wmbr.org, weekly Tuesdays 7-8pm. Archive at mixcloud.com/iancondry.

Since 2006, he has organized the MIT / Harvard Cool Japan research project, which explores the critical potential of popular culture.

He is currently working on a book about musicians on the margins in Tokyo, Boston, and Berlin.
Junot Díaz Junot Díaz
Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing

junot@mit.edu
Junot Díaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut book, Drown, was met with unprecedented acclaim; it became a national bestseller, earned him a PEN/Malamud Award, and has since grown into a landmark of contemporary literature. His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was published in 2007 and won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. In 2012, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the "Genius Grant", $500,000 over five years, no strings attached.

Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Díaz is a professor of writing at MIT.
Paloma Duong Paloma Duong
Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Latin American Studies

pduong@mit.edu
Paloma Duong is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies. At the intersection of cultural studies, media theory, and critical theory, Paloma researches and teaches modern and contemporary Latin American culture. She works with social texts and emergent media cultures that speak to the exercise of cultural agencies and the formation of political subjectivity. She is currently writing Portable Postsocialisms: Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History, a book-length study of Cuba’s changing mediascape and an inquiry on the postsocialist condition and its contexts. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Art Margins, and Cuban Counterpoints: Public Scholarship about a Changing Cuba.
Fox Harrell Fox Harrell
Professor of Digital Media and AI

fox.harrell@mit.edu
D. Fox Harrell is Professor of Digital Media & AI in both the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. His research focuses on the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. He founded and directs the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) to develop new forms of computational narrative, gaming, social media, and related digital media based in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. He is the author of the book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression (MIT Press, 2013). In 2010, the National Science Foundation recognized Harrell with an NSF CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” In 2014-2015, he was awarded a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University and was recipient of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication.
Heather Hendershot Heather Hendershot
Professor

hshot@mit.edu
Heather Hendershot studies conservative media and political movements, film and television genres, and American film history. She has held fellowships at Vassar College, New York University, and Princeton University, and she has also been a Guggenheim fellow.

Hendershot is particularly interested in the complicated relationship between “extremist” and “mainstream” conservatism and in how that relationship is negotiated by conservative media. Her courses emphasize the interplay between industrial, economic, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen (big or little). Students are encouraged to consider the ways that TV and film writers, directors, and producers have attempted creativity and innovation while working within an industry that demands novelty but also often fears new approaches to character and narrative.

Hendershot is the editor of Nickelodeon Nation (2004) and the author of Saturday Morning Censors (1998), Shaking the World for Jesus (2004), and What's Fair on the Air? (2011). For five years she was the editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. During the 2014–2015 academic year, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University where she wrote Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line (2016). She is currently working on two research projects, one on Georgia Governor Lester Maddox and another on media coverage of the Chicago 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Eric Klopfer Eric Klopfer
Head of CMS/W
Professor and Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade

klopfer@mit.edu
Eric Klopfer is Professor and Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT. He is also a co-faculty director for MIT’s J-WEL World Education Lab. His work uses a Design Based Research methodology to span the educational technology ecosystem, from design and development of new technologies to professional development and implementation. Much of Klopfer's research has focused on computer games and simulations for building understanding of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Much of his research centers on the affordances of new technologies including AR, VR and mobile, and how those can be applied today. He is the co-author of the books Adventures in Modeling, The More We Know, and Resonant Games, as well as author of Augmented Learning.

His lab has produced software (from casual mobile games to the MMO The Radix Endeavor) and platforms (including StarLogo Nova and Taleblazer) used by millions of people, as well as online courses that have reached hundreds of thousands.

Klopfer is also the co-founder and past President of the non-profit Learning Games Network.
Helen Elaine Lee Helen Elaine Lee
Professor

helee@mit.edu
Helen Elaine Lee is a graduate of Harvard College (1981) and Harvard Law School (1985). She is a novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, The Serpent's Gift, was published by Atheneum and her second novel, Water Marked, was published by Scribner. Her short story “Blood Knot” appeared in the spring 2017 issue of Ploughshares and the story “Lesser Crimes” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of Callaloo. Helen was on the board of PEN New England for 10 years, and she served on its Freedom to Write Committee and volunteered with its Prison Creative Writing Program, which she helped to start. She has written about the experience of teaching creative writing in prison in a New York Times Book Review essay, “Visible Men”. Her stories about prisoners have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Hanging Loose, Best African American Fiction 2009 (Bantam Books), and Solstice Literary Magazine. Her novel Pomegranate, which will be published by Simon Schuster’s Atria Books, in the fall of 2021, is about a recovering addict who is getting out of prison and, inspired partly by the love of a woman on the inside, strives to stay clean, get her kids back, and choose life. Helen is Director of MIT’s Program in Women’s & Gender Studies.
Thomas Levenson Thomas Levenson
Professor of Science Writing

levenson@mit.edu
Professor Thomas Levenson is the winner of Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, Peabody Award (shared), New York Chapter Emmy, and the AAAS/Westinghouse award. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, the Boston Globe, Discover, and The Sciences. He is winner of the 2005 National Academies Communications Award for Origins.
Alan Lightman Alan Lightman
Professor of the Practice of the Humanities
Interim Director of Graduate Studies for Science Writing

lightman@mit.edu
Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. He was educated at Princeton University and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. Before coming to MIT, he was on the faculty of Harvard University. At MIT, Lightman was the first person to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities at MIT, and was John Burchard Professor of Humanities before becoming Professor of the Practice of the Humanities to allow more time for his writing. Lightman is the author of five novels, two collections of essays, a book-length narrative poem, and several books on science. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, Harper's, Nautilus, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications. His novel Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller and has been translated into thirty languages. His novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in fiction. His most recent books are Screening Room, A Memoir of the South (2015), named one of the best books of 2015 by the Washington Post, The Accidental Universe (2016), named by Brainpickings as one of the best books of 2016, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine (2018), an extended essay on the intersection of science and spirituality and the basis for an essay on the PBS Newshour, and In Praise of Wasting Time (2018), which investigates the creativity born from allowing our minds to freely roam. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has won numerous other awards and is the recipient of five honorary degrees. Lightman is also the founding director of the Harpswell Foundation, which works to advance a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.
Kenneth Manning Kenneth Manning
Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric and History of Science

manning@mit.edu
Kenneth Manning received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University (History of Science; 1970, 1971, and 1974). He joined the MIT faculty in 1974.

His first major work was a study of nineteenth-century mathematics. This was followed by Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just (1983), which won the Pfizer Award and the Lucy Hampton Bostick Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is currently studying the role of blacks in American medicine, and has authored a number of scholarly articles on blacks in science and medicine.
Seth Mnookin Seth Mnookin
Professor of Science Writing; Director, MIT Communications Forum

smnookin@mit.edu
Seth Mnookin is a longtime journalist and science writer. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the National Association of Science Writers “Science in Society” Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the author of the 2006 New York Times bestseller Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, which chronicles the challenges and triumphs of the John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group of the Boston Red Sox. His first book, 2004′s Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media, was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.

Seth's 2014 New Yorker piece on rare genetic diseases won the American Medical Writers Association prize for best story of the year and was included in the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. He is an elected board member of the National Association of Science Writers and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including STAT, New York, Wired, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Spin, Slate, and Salon.com. A former music columnist for The New York Observer, he began his journalism career as a rock critic for the now-defunct webzine Addicted to Noise. He graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a degree in History and Science, and was a 2004 Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Nick Montfort Nick Montfort
Professor of Digital Media

nickm@nickm.com
Nick Montfort develops computational poetry and art, often collaboratively. Recent publications include Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities, second edition (MIT Press) along with several computer-generated poetry books: Golem, Hard West Turn, The Truelist, #!, the collaboration 2x6, and Autopia. He has worked to contribute to platform studies, critical code studies, and electronic literature.
Jim Paradis Jim Paradis
Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing and Comparative Media Studies

jparadis@mit.edu
James Paradis is a historian of communication who focuses on problems of media and the professions. He works on the mutually-influential rise of professionalism and vernacular culture, the public reception of science, and the way in which fields of expertise are represented in public media. These interests converge in his current work on media and global warming. His methods are comparative, and draw on cultural studies, biographical approaches, intellectual history, and the history of rhetoric to study science popularization, science fiction, science education, two-cultures controversies, science as entertainment, and vernacular science.

These interests are highlighted in his various books, articles, and edited collections, including T. H. Huxley: Man's Place in Nature (Nebraska 1978); Victorian Science and Victorian Values (with T. Postlewait, Rutgers 1984); Evolution and Ethics (with G. Williams, Princeton 1989); Textual Dynamics of the Professions (with C. Bazerman, Wisconsin 1991); and Samuel Butler: Victorian against the Grain (Toronto 2007).

His newest course was featured by the MIT School in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences: "In a humanities media class, MIT students gain insights and skills to increase support for effective climate policy".

Paradis is the former Head of Writing and Humanistic Studies and its successor CMS/W; he is the Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing and Comparative Media Studies.
Justin Reich Justin Reich
Assistant Professor

jreich@mit.edu
Justin Reich is an educational researcher interested in the future of learning in a networked world. He is the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab which aspires to design, implement and research the future of teacher learning. He is the author of Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education from Harvard University Press. He is the host of the TeachLab podcast, and five open online courses on EdX including Sorting Truth from Fiction: Civic Online Reasoning and Becoming a More Equitable Educator: Mindsets and Practices. Justin is a former fellow and faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Paul Roquet Paul Roquet
Associate Professor of Media Studies and Japan Studies

proquet@mit.edu
Paul Roquet studies the use of media as personal technologies of perceptual and emotional self-regulation. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minnesota, 2016) explores how music, video art, film, and literature came to be used as tools of individual atmospheric mood control, theorizing what it means to treat media as a sensory resource for self-care. His current project rethinks the history of consumer VR as an attempt to perceptually recenter a person within their own private media enclosure. All of Roquet’s work engages closely with Japanese materials and social contexts, drawing on the country's history with media technologies to offer new perspectives for a global media studies. His essays have been published in journals including Animation, Journal of Japanese Studies, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Representations, Sound Studies, and the Journal of Visual Culture. For more details visit proquet.mit.edu.
Edward Schiappa Edward Schiappa
John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities

schiappa@mit.edu
Edward Schiappa conducts research in argumentation, media influence, and rhetorical theory. He is currently writing a book titled The Transgender Exigency: Defining Sex/Gender in the 21st Century.

He has published ten books and his research has appeared in such journals as Philosophy & Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, Argumentation, Communication Monographs, and Communication Theory.

He has served as editor of Argumentation and Advocacy and received NCA's Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award in 2000 and the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Distinguished Scholar Award in 2006. He was named a National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar in 2009.

Schiappa is former Head of CMS/W and is John E. Burchard Professor of the Humanities.
T.L. Taylor T.L. Taylor
Professor of Comparative Media Studies

tltaylor@mit.edu
T.L. Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and co-founder of AnyKey, an organization dedicated to supporting and developing fair and inclusive esports. She is a qualitative sociologist who has focused on internet and game studies for over two decades. Dr. Taylor’s research explores the interrelations between culture and technology in online leisure environments.

Her book about game live streaming, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton University Press, 2018), is the first of its kind to chronicle the emerging media space of online game broadcasting and won the American Sociological Association’s CITAMS book award. She is also the author of Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, 2012) which explores the rise of esports and Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006), an ethnography of the massively multiplayer online game EverQuest. In 2012 Princeton University published her co-authored book on conducting ethnographic research in online multi-user worlds, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method.

Dr. Taylor is a highly sought after speaker. Both the White House and the International Olympics Committee have invited her to special summits focused on gaming. And journalists for the New York Times, PBS, the Los Angeles Times, BBC, CBC, and many others often reach out to Dr. Taylor for her expertise.

She also currently serves as a member of Twitch’s Safety Advisory Council as well as the editorial boards of Social Media & Society, Games and Culture, American Journal of Play, and ROMChip.

For more information about Dr. Taylor visit tltaylor.com.
William Uricchio William Uricchio
Professor of Comparative Media Studies

uricchio@mit.edu
William Uricchio revisits the histories of old media when they were new; explores interactive and participatory documentary; writes about the past and future of television; thinks about algorithms and archives; and researches narrative in immersive and interactive settings. He is Professor of Comparative Media Studies, founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. He was also Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has held visiting professorships at the Freie Universität Berlin, Stockholm University, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Lichtenberg-Kolleg), China University of Science and Technology, and in Denmark where he was DREAM professor. He has received Guggenheim, Humboldt, and Fulbright fellowships, the Berlin Prize, and the Mercator Prize.

His publications include Reframing Culture; We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities; Die Anfänge des deutschen Fernsehens; Media Cultures; Many More Lives of the Batman; Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media Within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms, and hundreds of essays and book chapters, including a visual "white paper" on the documentary impulse (momentsofinnovation.mit.edu). He is currently leading a two-year research initiative on augmentation and public spaces with partners in Montreal and Amsterdam.
Jing Wang Jing Wang
Professor of Chinese Media and Cultural Studies

jing@mit.edu
Professor Jing Wang, S. C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language and Culture, is the founder and director of MIT New Media Action Lab and serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board for Creative Commons China. Wang is a recipient of the Overseas Distinguished Professor Award, given by China's Ministry of Education. She is also the founder and secretary-general of NGO2.0, a grassroots nonprofit organization based in Beijing and Shenzhen, specializing in ICT (Information Communication Technology) powered activism. Ford Foundation awarded her a twelve-year grant (2009-2021) to develop NGO2.0.

Wang’s first book The Story of Stone (published in English and Japanese) won her the 1992 Joseph Levenson Prize for the “Best Book on Pre-Modern China,” awarded by the Association of Asian Studies. Her third single-authored book Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture came out in Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese translations. Her fourth single-authored book The Other Digital China: Nonconfrontational Activism on the Social Web was published by Harvard University Press in December 2019. One of Wang’s edited volumes (with Winnie Wong) “Reconsidering the 2006 MIT Visualizing Cultures Controversy” won the Council of Editors of Learned Journal's “Best Special Issue Award” in 2015. Professor Wang is currently working with a colleague in China to edit a volume on entertainment media and the future of content.

Wang has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies of Harvard University, the National Humanities Center, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.

Wang’s current research interests include entertainment media in China and the US, advertising and marketing, civic media and communication, social media action research, and nonprofit technology, with an area focus on the People’s Republic of China.
 
 
 
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