Linda Griffith
School of Engineering Teaching Innovation Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering and MacVicar Fellow, MIT
Specializations:
Integration of Tissue Engineering and Systems Biology
Functional Biomaterials
Drug Development
Course idea:
A few studies have shown that women miss more work than men because they themselves are ill, not just because they are taking care of sick family members. I am very plugged in to the medical side and epidemiological side of gynecology disorders, as well as diseases that skew female (eg most autoimmune diseases, many chronic inflammatory diseases). I wish there were more intensity in the area of how the cumulative morbidity of health disorders impacts women's educational and professional development, and would very much like to partner with someone with expertise in the social/work side.
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Edmund Bertschinger
Professor, Physics, MIT
Professor, Physics
Specializations:
Astrophysics
Classical and quantum mechanics
Social justice practice
Course idea:
None specified
Find more information about Edmund Bertschinger’s work on his personal website.
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Lerna Ekmekçioglu
Associate Professor, History, MIT
Specializations:
History of feminism
War
Women and Gender
Turkey, Armenia, and the Ottoman Empire
Minority-majority relations
Course idea:
Non specified
Lerna Ekmekcioglu is a historian of the modern Middle East and the Director of the Women and Gender Studies Program. She specializes in Turkish and Armenian lands in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her work focuses on minority-majority relations and the ways in which gendered analytical lenses help us better understand coexistence and conflict, including genocide and post-genocide. She is also interested in the history of non-Western feminisms, including Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, Jewish, and Greek women’s movements. She teaches courses on cultural pluralism, women and war, global revolutions, and women and gender in the Middle East and North Africa. Prof. Ekmekcioglu is the winner of the 2016 Levitan Teaching Award in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), which recognizes SHASS teachers “who make a profound difference in the educational experience of MIT undergraduate and graduate students.” Prof. Ekmekcioglu organizes the Bi-annual McMillan-Stewart Lecture Series on women in the developing world.
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Nick Montfort
Professor and Poet, Comparative Media Studies and Writing, MIT
Nick Montfort develops computational poetry and art and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Recent books include The Future and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press) and several books of computational poetry: Hard West Turn, The Truelist, #!, the collaboration 2x6, and Autopia. He has worked to contribute to platform studies, critical code studies, and electronic literature.
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Specializations:
Digital Media
Course idea:
To guest lecture and discuss digital art & literary works that deal with gender.
Sandy Alexandre
Professor of Law, Northeastern University
Specializations:
African-American Literature and Culture
African Diaspora Studies
Historicism
Digital Humanities
Course idea:
None specified
Sandy Alexandre’s research spans the late nineteenth-century to present-day black American literature and culture. Her first book, The Properties of Violence: Claims to Ownership in Representations of Lynching (Mississippi 2012), uses the history of American lynching violence as a framework to understand matters concerning displacement, property ownership, and the American pastoral ideology in a literary context. For example, in one chapter—on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)—she asks readers to consider the gendered implications of seeing lynching iconography itself as a form of owned property.
Sandy Alexandre is currently writing another book, Up From Chattels: Thinghood in an Ethics of Black Curation, which will take as its point of departure the premise that the former, enforced condition of black Americans as fungible merchandise can haunt, inform, and morally energize, to some extent, their very own relationships to material objects. This book will explore how some black Americans create what Alexandre calls a “culture of significance” with material objects. Using literary analysis, studying material artifacts, and engaging the work of black collectors, Alexandre argues that this improvised, curated, and eventually sacralized culture of subject-object relations constitutes an immanent critique of consumer capitalism. To think truly analytically about black-American material culture without resorting hastily to jeremiads about the so-called irreparable and vitiating influence of “bling bling” on that culture is to grant the possibility that, based on the sobering history and memory of black thinghood, some black Americans do engage in a practice of subject-object relations that can be, at once, political, ecological, spiritual and aesthetic. Overall, Alexandre’s work takes into serious account the ways in which an ecology comprised of people, places, and things can, at once, reverberate and attempt to negotiate the various instances of racial violence that mark the aggregate of U.S. history.
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Sally Haslanger
Professor of Philosophy, MIT
shaslang@mit.edu
Specializations:
- Race
- Gender
- Epistemology
- Social ontology
Course idea:
None specified
Sally Haslanger is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. She has published on topics in metaphysics, epistemology and feminist theory, with a recent emphasis on accounts of the social construction of race and gender. In metaphysics, her work has focused on theories of substance, especially on the problem of persistence through change and on Aristotle's view that substances are composites of matter and form. Her work in feminist theory takes up issues in feminist epistemology and metaphysics, with a special interest in the distinction between natural and social kinds. She has co-edited Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays (Cornell University Press, 2005) with Charlotte Witt, Theorizing Feminisms (Oxford University Press, 2005) with Elizabeth Hackett, and Persistence (MIT Press, 2006) with Roxanne Marie Kurtz. She regularly teaches courses cross-listed with Women's Studies. Before coming to MIT, she taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and the University of California-Irvine.