Meet the 2025 tenured professors in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

In 2025, six faculty were granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Sara Brown is an associate professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. She develops stage designs for theater, opera, and dance by approaching the scenographic space as a catalyst for collective imagination. Her work is rooted in curiosity and interdisciplinary collaboration, and spans virtual environments, immersive performance installations, and evocative stage landscapes. Her recent projects include "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 upcoming co-directed work, "Circlusion," takes place within a fully immersive inflatable space and reimagines the female body's response to power and violence. Her designs have been seen 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 Department of Political Science. He is also a faculty affiliate of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. Egami specializes in political methodology and develops statistical methods for questions in political science and the social sciences. His current research programs focus on three areas: external validity and generalizability; machine learning and AI for the social sciences; and causal inference with network and spatial data. His work has appeared in various 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. Before joining MIT, Egami was an assistant professor at Columbia University. He received a PhD from Princeton University (2020) and a BA from the University of Tokyo (2015).

Rachel Fraser is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Before coming to MIT, Fraser taught at the University of Oxford, where she also completed her graduate work in philosophy. She has interests in epistemology, language, feminism, aesthetics, and political philosophy. At present, her main project is a book manuscript on the epistemology of narrative.

Brian Hedden PhD '12 is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, with a shared appointment in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focuses on how we ought to form beliefs and make decisions. He works in epistemology, decision theory, and ethics, including ethics of AI. He is the author of "Reasons without Persons: Rationality, Identity, and Time" (Oxford University Press, 2015) and articles on topics including collective action problems, legal standards of proof, algorithmic fairness, and political polarization, among others. Prior to joining MIT, he was a faculty member at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney, and 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. She is a linguist with a special interest in semantics. Much of her work focuses on trying to understand general constraints on human language meaning; that is, the principles regulating which meanings can be expressed by human languages and how languages can package meaning. Variants of this question were also central to grants she received from the Austrian and German research foundations. She earned her PhD in linguistics from the University of Vienna and worked as a postdoc and/or lecturer at the Universities of Vienna, Graz, Göttingen, and at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent position was as a junior professor at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Miguel Zenón is an associate professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. The Puerto Rican alto saxophonist, composer, band leader, music producer, and educator is a Grammy Award winner, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Doris Duke Artist Award. He also holds an honorary doctorate degree in the arts from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. Zenón has released 18 albums as a band leader and collaborated with some of the great musicians and ensembles of his time. As a composer, Zenón has been commissioned by Chamber Music America, Logan Center for The Arts, The Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Miller Theater, The Hewlett Foundation, Peak Performances, and many of his peers. Zenón has given hundreds of lectures and master classes at institutions all over the world, and in 2011 he founded Caravana Cultural - a program that presents jazz concerts free of charge in rural areas of Puerto Rico.