Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman looks back on a decade of science on stage
For a decade, Catalyst Collaborative at MIT (CC@MIT) has convened scientists and theater artists searching for common ground and, in a partnership between MIT and nearby Central Square Theater (CST),...
View ArticleAnnouncing MIT-SHASS new faculty for fall 2015
The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences has announced the newest members of their faculty. They come with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research: ecology and...
View ArticleHundreds of MIT students explore fields at the 2015 TOUR de SHASS
On Sept. 10, several hundred MIT undergraduates attended the annual TOUR de SHASS, an academic expo that gives students a chance to discover the range and depth of MIT courses in the School of...
View ArticleMIT senior takes on double major in brain and cognitive sciences plus theater...
Abra Shen didn’t expect to graduate from MIT with a theater degree, but she couldn’t resist adding theater arts to her major in brain and cognitive sciences when the opportunity presented itself. In...
View ArticleFour professors named 2016 MacVicar Faculty Fellows
Each year, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program recognizes professors who exhibit exceptional undergraduate teaching, educational innovation, and mentoring. The awardees this year are Srinivas Devadas,...
View ArticleLearning to think like an engineer
Since she was a little girl launching air-pressure rockets in her back yard in Houston, Texas, Neerja Aggarwal knew that she loved math and science. “I was always up to something,” the electrical...
View ArticleApril 12 symposium: Take an immersive, intellectual journey across campus
When MIT moved from Boston to Cambridge in 1916, it built a new campus designed to foster collaboration across disparate disciplines. As the Institute celebrates the centennial of that historic move,...
View Article3 Questions: Alan Brody on “Small Infinities”
You may have read books about Isaac Newton. But have you ever seen a play about him? Now is your chance. The MIT 2016 celebrations, commemorating the Institute’s 100th year in Cambridge, include the...
View Article3 Questions: Jeffrey Ravel on bringing data to cultural history
A couple of centuries from now, will anyone remember the hit Broadway show “Hamilton?” Will they know how popular it was? As it happens, historians do know a great deal about Enlightenment-era French...
View ArticleNew faculty in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) has announced the newest members of its faculty. They come to MIT with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research,...
View Article“Uniting through Voice and Song” event celebrates values that connect the MIT...
On the evening of Nov. 17, MIT faculty, staff, and students came together to affirm — through words and music — the enduring values and purposes that unite the community. Some 150 people gathered in...
View ArticleCreating “big, beautiful things”
Garrett Parrish grew up singing and dancing as a theater kid, influenced by his older siblings, one of whom is an actor and the other a stage manager. But by the time he reached high school, Parrish...
View ArticleThe world as we think the world should be
At MIT, it’s amazingly easy to find an engineering student preparing for a role in a Shakespeare play, a history student writing a script, or a young computer scientist crafting a high tech theater...
View ArticleChanneling Gilbert and Sullivan
When graduate student Phil Arevalo wants a diversion from his research on gene transfer and population structure, he turns to the comic operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan.“These plays are very silly,...
View ArticleFeatured video: Bringing “Einstein’s Dreams” to life
“Einstein’s Dreams,” a novel written by Alan Lightman, physicist and professor of the practice of the humanities in MIT Comparative Media Studies / Writing, is a collection of dreams, or “thought...
View ArticleA.R. Gurney, acclaimed playwright, author, and longtime MIT professor, dies...
A.R. "Pete" Gurney Jr., an internationally acclaimed playwright and author who served on the MIT faculty for 36 years, died June 13 at his home in New York City. He was 86.The author of such well-known...
View ArticleMIT Theater Arts: The next act
In 1597, when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s lease expired on their theater building in Shoreditch, then still a suburb outside the City of London, the company dismantled the structure, timber by timber,...
View ArticleImagination off the charts
“Being at MIT consistently reminds me of how wonderful it is when people think beyond the surface level — up and down to other realms of things,” Jacob Collier said from the Kresge Auditorium stage on...
View ArticleTimes Higher Education names MIT No. 2 university worldwide for the arts and...
The Times Higher Education 2018 World University Rankings has named MIT the No. 2 university in the world for arts and humanities. The two top ranked universities — Stanford University and MIT — are...
View ArticleBridging the science-policy divide
In the eighth grade, in response to being asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Talia Weiss critically examined her aspirations and gathered them into one succinct statement: “I wanted to be a...
View ArticleAudra McDonald receives 2018 McDermott Award
Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award-winning singer and actress Audra McDonald has been named the recipient of the 2018 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT. The $100,000 cash prize, to be awarded at a...
View ArticleNew chapter for theater at MIT opens with “Everybody,” a morality play for...
“Everybody,” the inaugural performance in MIT’s new theater building, is a 2017 play based on “Everyman,” the venerable 15th century English morality play. As performed last week at MIT, “Everybody” at...
View ArticleSHASS Research Fund names 10 recipients for 2018
The annual SHASS Research Fund supports MIT research in the humanities, arts, and social sciences that shows promise of making an important contribution to the proposed area of activity. The 10...
View ArticleFeatured video: Celebrating the arts at MIT
What makes the arts such a vital part of MIT? A creative culture where experimentation and innovation cross all disciplines and break all boundaries. More than half of all undergraduates expand their...
View ArticlePlaywrights Lab gives young writers a professional experience
On a recent Friday evening, six people gathered around a table in a mostly-empty studio in MIT’s new theater arts building on the western edge of campus. In a few hours time, the group — local actors...
View ArticleCS+HASS SuperUROP debuts with nine research projects
Trade policy, government transparency, and music composition systems were among the humanities, arts, and social science (HASS) research areas explored this year by students in MIT’s Advanced...
View ArticleIn profile: Jamshied Sharifi ’83, Tony Award winner
While MIT may be best known for its Nobel Prize winners and MacArthur “Geniuses,” on June 10, a Tony Award was added to the mix, thanks to composer Jamshied Sharifi ’83, who orchestrated the music for...
View Article“Schoenberg in Hollywood,” the opera
Today the Boston Lyric Opera presents the world premiere of “Schoenberg in Hollywood,” a new opera by Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and director of the MIT Media Lab's...
View ArticleTimes Higher Education ranks MIT No.1 in business and economics, No.2 in arts...
MIT has taken the top spot in the Business and Economics subject category in the 2019 Times Higher Education World University Rankings and, for the second year in a row, the No. 2 spot worldwide for...
View ArticleAndrew Schneider’s "NERVOUS/SYSTEM" boldly launches MIT Performing
Albert Einstein once said of his teaching style, “I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” That quote essentially describes how OBIE award-winning...
View ArticleSound and technology unlock innovation at MIT
Sound is a powerfully evocative medium, capable of conjuring authentic emotions and unlocking new experiences. This fall, several cross-disciplinary projects at MIT probed the technological and...
View ArticleChampion figure skater thrives at MIT
“Representing the Skating Club of Boston, please welcome now, Kevin Shum!” says the announcer at the 2018 U.S. Collegiate National Championship in Adrian, Michigan. Shum, wearing a sparkly...
View Article3 Questions: Ken Urban on theater, science, and tech
Ken Urban, a senior lecturer in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts Program (MTA) is a screenwriter, director, musician, and highly acclaimed playwright, whose work has been performed in New York, London,...
View ArticleThe music of the spheres
Space has long fascinated poets, physicists, astronomers, and science fiction writers. Musicians, too, have often found beauty and meaning in the skies above. At MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, a group of...
View ArticleComputing and artificial intelligence: Humanistic perspectives from MIT
The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing (SCC) will reorient the Institute to bring the power of computing and artificial intelligence to all fields at MIT, and to allow the future of...
View ArticleThe meanings of masks
As The Washington Post has reported, “at the heart of the dismal U.S. coronavirus response” is a “fraught relationship with masks.” In this series of commentaries — inspired by an idea from associate...
View ArticleExploring the lives of MIT pioneers through drama
With the Covid-19 pandemic squelching a lot of typical summer research activities for MIT students in 2020, three undergraduates joined forces for a different kind project: researching and writing a...
View ArticleExamining the French stage during the Enlightenment and French Revolution
The MIT Press recently published “Databases, Revenues and Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793,” an innovative collection of original essays that explore an important initiative in the digital...
View ArticleUnderstanding art in a time of crisis
Across America, the Covid-19 crisis is creating unsettling questions for opera companies. How can they produce performances during the pandemic? What kinds of art will people want? Will companies...
View ArticleWays of seeing the world
Anjali Nambrath is about to graduate from MIT with a double major in physics and mathematics, but her big project this winter didn’t center on neutrinos, the subject of her undergraduate thesis....
View ArticleSix humanities and arts faculty receive MIT SHASS Research Fund awards for 2022
The annual MIT SHASS Research Fund supports research in the Institute's humanities, arts, and social science fields that shows promise of making an important contribution to the proposed area of...
View ArticleMaking the case for “fake lawyering”
Most people wouldn’t put the words “MIT” and “lawyer” in the same sentence. In fact, only 1,393 alumni — about 1 percent — are lawyers, according to the MIT Alumni Association. But a contingent of MIT...
View Article“Ballet des Porcelaines” at MIT
A faraway island. An evil magician. A prince transformed into a teapot. A princess on a rescue mission.When the first performance of the “Ballet des Porcelaines” was staged at the Chateau de Morville...
View ArticleBreaking out of the box
“I’ve thought about it before, living in the country… It seems to me, if you're out there alone, maybe with a farm and fields and trees and the night sky, the stars, you start to think pretty quickly...
View ArticleComedy meets mathematics in a new opera at MIT
Over the course of her career, the composer Elena Ruehr has found inspiration in very different writers and very different worlds. She has, for example, set poems by Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes...
View ArticleKeeril Makan named associate dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and...
MIT Professor Keeril Makan has been named associate dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), effective July 1. Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS, says Makan...
View ArticleRe-imagining the opera of the future
In the mid-1980s, composer Tod Machover came across a copy of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novel “VALIS” in a Parisian bookstore. Based on a mystical vision Dick called his “pink light experience,”...
View ArticlePerformance art and science collide as students experience “Blue Man Group”
On a blustery December afternoon, with final exams and winter break on the horizon, the 500 undergraduate students enrolled in Professor Bradley Pentelute’s Course 5.111 (Principles of Chemical...
View Article3 Questions: Why study theater in a German language class?
Emily Goodling is a lecturer in German in Global Languages at MIT. She teaches class 21G.411 (Conflict, Contest, Controversy: A Literary Investigation of German Politics), a course that she developed...
View ArticleFaces of MIT: Lydia Brosnahan
A lot of behind-the-scenes work goes into creating an art installation or a theater production – not just by those making or performing their craft, but also by the staff members who coordinate the...
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