Public Histories of MIT

Public Histories of MIT situates the history of the Institute and the production and application of scientific knowledge within changing political and economic contexts in the US and the world. It examines the historical processes, frictions, and conjunctures that facilitated the growth and consolidation of MIT as a global institute of excellence offering a granular and multilayered examination of the transformational reach of the scientific and technological knowledge gained at the Institute, the making of MIT as a place where such knowledge was produced, and the political and social implications of the application of this knowledge the world over.

Sana Aiyar, Associate Professor of History; Research Director, South Asia and the Institute: Transformative Connections

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Forgotten Histories of the Circular Economy & Possible Futures of Sustainable Manufacturing

This project will connect scholars working on circular economies, historically and technically. The group will reflect on a forgotten history of the secondary-use economy that underpinned prolific wartime manufacturing in the United States. In the “Salvage for Victory” campaign, everyday Americans collected scrap metal for conversion into new products. This large-scale recycling infrastructure sourced millions of pounds of material for the Arsenal of Democracy, alleviating shortages and reducing waste. In a workshop and symposium, we will ask, what can we learn about the possibilities and limits of circular economies at home and abroad through the lens of World War II?

Megan Black, Associate Professor of History

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Woodcutters

This stage adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters will channel the novel’s ferocious critique of an artistic community that prizes comfort and prestige over aesthetic and political responsibility. Developed through a collaborative process that integrates all creative elements from the outset, the project will treat performance as both artwork and inquiry. Drawing on MIT’s vibrant humanities community, the production will embed interdisciplinary salons within the performance space, using the work to interrogate contemporary theater-making. At its core, the piece will grapple with a central: what does it mean to contribute to a culture world when the actual world is coming undone?

Sara Brown, Associate Professor, Music and Theater Arts

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Le(Re)purposing Power: From Houses of Worship to Cathedrals of Computing

As emerging technologies alter physical systems and redefine how communities connect and knowledge circulates, we look to religious traditions for insight into meaning-making. Bringing the study of technological innovation into dialogue with religious practices illuminates how these forces have historically shaped one another, and how they might do so in our own time. By analyzing the material, social, and technical dimensions of advanced computing infrastructures housed within spiritually significant spaces and the ways they manifest power, this project provides valuable insight into how symbolic and physical infrastructures can influence technological advancements and growth trajectories in alignment with spiritual, humanistic, and sustainable values.

Anne McCants, Ann P. Friedlaender Professor of History

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Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey Research, Revitalization and Documentation (PWRRD, pronounced “powered”)

PWRRD is the union of two facets of linguistic research conducted at MIT: theoretical advancement and the revitalization of indigenous languages. PWRRD brings these two threads together by assembling a coalition of Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey speakers and MIT linguistics students, postdocs, and faculty to document, model, and ultimately revitalize the Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey language. Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey is critically endangered, with an aging speaker population. To increase access to language instruction among the Passamaquoddy-Wolastoqey community, we will use the results of our research to build an online language learning tool in collaboration with teachers and learners of the language.

Elise Newman, Assistant Professor, Linguistics and Philosophy

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Futures of the Digital Past: Artificial Shakespeare

Generative AI pushes us to re-imagine our interactions with existing archives: What kinds of new information can we retrieve from these data collections? In what ways do these spur new research questions and creative possibilities? We will address such questions through a set of AI interventions into arguably the most famous domain of literary, cultural, and historical study worldwide: Shakespeare. Building upon the internationally recognised, multi-faceted archival and research initiative on Global Shakespeares in MIT’s Literature Section, we aim to develop a Shakespeare-specific multimodal LLM. It will function as conversational partner to explore new ways of interacting with our archive’s text, image and video-content, and produce richly contextualised analyses of films and performance videos.

Shankar Raman, Professor of Literature

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Tucăture: A Living Laboratory for Kirundi Language Preservation and Linguistic Discovery

We plan to develop a tool that helps speakers of Kirundi, the national language of Burundi, improve their tonal literacy levels, while also contributing to Kirundi’s linguistic analysis.  Kirundi is a tonal language. Kirundi speakers are literate, but tonal literacy is low. Most texts omit tone marks entirely, creating extensive ambiguity. We address this challenge in two ways. One component evaluates if existing tone marks are suboptimal and, if so, proposes changes. Another component is a mobile application that improves tone-marking proficiency among Kirundi speakers through interactive drills to strengthen the association between tone marks, possibly revised, and tones.

Donca Steriade, Class of 1941 Professor of Linguistics

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