As shared by: Peter
Dizikes | MIT News Office (Excerpts)
May
21, 2015
Political
scientist Dr. Melissa Nobles has been named the new dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), effective
July 1. She will succeed Dean Deborah Fitzgerald,
who announced last fall that she would step down this June, having
served since 2006.
Nobles,
the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and head of
MIT’s Department of Political Science since 2013, is an
accomplished scholar who has been a member of the MIT faculty since
1995. In addition to her role as department head, Nobles has served
on a series of Institute-wide committees over the last decade.
“To
tackle our global challenges — from water and food scarcity and
climate change to digital learning, innovation, and human health —
we need ambitious new answers from science and engineering. But
because these challenges are rooted in culture, economics, and
politics, meaningful solutions must reflect the wisdom of these
domains, too,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif says. “Professor
Nobles offers us a vision of the humanities, arts, and social
sciences as the human stage on which our scientific and technical
solutions have purpose and meaning. We are fortunate that she will
bring to the deanship such an expansive worldview.”
Nobles
says she believes research and teaching within SHASS are integral to
all of MIT’s work.
“Upon
being asked to serve as dean, I was thrilled and felt a great sense
of honor and privilege to have the opportunity to lead such an
important school at MIT,” Nobles says. “I think SHASS is so
important because nearly all the rest of the endeavors at which the
Institute so excels — science, engineering, business, and
architecture — all exist within a social, political, cultural, and
economic context, and that’s precisely where SHASS lives.”
She
adds: “We have to be mindful of answering the question: To what
ends are our technological and scientific endeavors being put? Many
of the answers to those kinds of questions rest in the departments
and courses in SHASS.”
Nobles
joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1995 fresh from
earning her PhD in political science at Yale. Since then she has
distinguished herself as a scholar in MIT's best problem-solving
tradition, living out her department's commitment to "rigor and
relevance" through pioneering research on global questions of
racial and ethnic politics and justice. She earned her first endowed
chair, the Cecil and Ida Green Assistant Professor of Political
Science, in 1997. She was promoted to associate professor of
political science in 1999 and granted tenure in 2002. She became a
full professor in 2009 and received her current endowed chair in
2010, before becoming department head.
In
her two books, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics and The Politics of Official Apologies, she draws
illuminating comparisons across societies as disparate as Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, Brazil and the United States. This
cross-cultural perspective also informs her teaching, where she takes
particular pleasure in watching students from the US and other parts
of the world open each other's minds to new points of view.
Nobles
was selected from a field of candidates evaluated by a faculty search
committee. The search committee, chaired by Evan Ziporyn, the Kenin
Sahin Distinguished Professor in MIT’s music program, comprised
faculty from 11 different departments and programs within SHASS.
In all, SHASS has 21 departments, programs, centers, and consortia and 172 full-time faculty members. Its professors have won four Nobel Prizes, seven MacArthur Fellowships, four Pulitzer Prizes, 38 Guggenheim Fellowships, and four John Bates Clark Medals, among other distinctions.
In all, SHASS has 21 departments, programs, centers, and consortia and 172 full-time faculty members. Its professors have won four Nobel Prizes, seven MacArthur Fellowships, four Pulitzer Prizes, 38 Guggenheim Fellowships, and four John Bates Clark Medals, among other distinctions.
