SHASS News

Mlen-Too Wesley has faded memories of his early childhood in Liberia, but the sharpest one has shaped his life. Wesley was 4 years old when he and his family boarded a military airplane to flee the West African nation. At the time, the country was embroiled in a 14-year civil war that killed approximately 200,000 people, displaced about […]

Migrants have become a flashpoint in global politics. But new research by an MIT political scientist, focused on West Germany and Poland after World War II, shows that in the long term, those countries developed stronger states, more prosperous economies, and more entrepreneurship after receiving a large influx of immigrants. Those findings come from a […]

The MIT Global Seed Funds (GSF) program fosters global research collaborations with MIT faculty and their peers abroad — creating partnerships that tackle complex global issues, from climate change to health-care challenges and beyond. Administered by the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS), the GSF program has awarded more than $26 million to over 1,200 faculty […]

As young children, how do we build our vocabulary? Even by age 1, many infants seem to think that if they hear a new word, it means something different from the words they already know. But why they think so has remained subject to inquiry among scholars for the last 40 years. A new study […]

Yiming Chen ’24, Wilhem Hector, Anushka Nair, and David Oluigbo have been selected as 2025 Rhodes Scholars and will begin fully funded postgraduate studies at Oxford University in the U.K. next fall. In addition to MIT’s two U.S. Rhodes winners, Oluigbo and Nair, two affiliates were awarded international Rhodes Scholarships: Chen for Rhodes’ China constituency and […]