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In 2025, six educators were awarded tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
Sara Brown serves as an associate professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. She creates set designs for theater, opera, and dance by viewing the scenographic space as a catalyst for collective creativity. Her endeavors are grounded in curiosity and interdisciplinary partnerships, and encompass virtual settings, immersive performance installations, and evocative stage environments. Her recent endeavors feature “Carousel” at the Boston Lyric Opera; the virtual dance performance “The Other Shore” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Jacob’s Pillow; and “The Lehman Trilogy” at the Huntington Theatre Company. Her forthcoming co-directed project, “Circlusion,” unfolds within a fully immersive inflatable environment and reinterprets the female body’s reaction to power and violence. Her designs have been showcased at the BAM Next Wave Festival in New York, the Festival d’Automne in Paris, and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge.
Naoki Egami is a professor in the Political Science Department. He is also a faculty affiliate of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. Egami’s expertise lies in political methodology, developing statistical techniques for inquiries in political science and the social sciences. His ongoing research initiatives concentrate on three areas: external validity and generalizability; machine learning and AI applications in social sciences; and causal inference utilizing network and spatial data. His work has been published in numerous esteemed academic journals in political science, statistics, and computer science, such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B), NeurIPS, and Science Advances. Prior to his appointment at MIT, Egami served as an assistant professor at Columbia University. He earned a PhD from Princeton University (2020) and a BA from the University of Tokyo (2015).
Rachel Fraser holds the position of associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Before joining MIT, Fraser taught at the University of Oxford, where she also completed her graduate studies in philosophy. She has a keen interest in epistemology, linguistics, feminism, aesthetics, and political philosophy. Currently, her principal project entails a book manuscript focused on the epistemology of narrative.
Brian Hedden PhD ’12 is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, with a concurrent position in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. His research investigates how individuals should form beliefs and make choices. He specializes in epistemology, decision theory, and ethics, including the ethics surrounding AI. He authored “Reasons without Persons: Rationality, Identity, and Time” (Oxford University Press, 2015) and has written articles on subjects including collective action dilemmas, legal standards of proof, algorithmic fairness, and political polarization, among others. Before becoming part of MIT, he was a faculty member at both the Australian National University and the University of Sydney, as well as a junior research fellow at Oxford. He received his BA from Princeton University in 2006 and his PhD from MIT in 2012.
Viola Schmitt is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A linguist with a particular focus on semantics, a significant portion of her research aims to decipher the general constraints governing the meaning of human language; specifically, the principles that dictate which meanings can be articulated by human languages and how those languages convey meaning. Variations of this inquiry were also central to grants she received from Austrian and German research foundations. She obtained her PhD in linguistics from the University of Vienna and has held postdoctoral and/or lecturing positions at the Universities of Vienna, Graz, Göttingen, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent role was as a junior professor at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Miguel Zenón is an associate professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. This Puerto Rican alto saxophonist, composer, band leader, music producer, and educator is a Grammy Award winner and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Doris Duke Artist Award. He also possesses an honorary doctorate in the arts from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. Zenón has issued 18 albums as a band leader and has collaborated with many of the most prominent musicians and ensembles of his era. As a composer, Zenón has received commissions from Chamber Music America, Logan Center for The Arts, The Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Miller Theater, The Hewlett Foundation, Peak Performances, and numerous peers. Zenón has conducted hundreds of lectures and master classes at institutions worldwide, and in 2011 established Caravana Cultural — a program that offers free jazz concerts in rural communities across Puerto Rico.
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