Three Women Appointed New Leaders of Academic Programs at MIT

The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge has announced the appointments of three women faculty members to leadership posts. All three appointments become effective on July 1.

Mary Fuller was named head of the literature program. She has served on the faculty at MIT since 1989. She is the author of Voyages in Print:  English Travel to America, 1576-1624 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Remembering the Early Modern Voyage:  English Narratives in the Age of European Expansion (Palgrave, 2008).

Professor Fuller received her bachelor’s degree in English from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Johns Hopkins University.

Melissa Nobles, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, was named chair of the political science department. She is the author of Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000) and The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Professor Nobles is a graduate of Brown University and holds master’s and doctoral degrees in political science from Yale University.

Emma Tang was named director of the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT. She is the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations at the university. She joined the MIT faculty in 1998 as an assistant professor of foreign languages and literature. She is the author of Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895 (Harvard University Asian Center, 2006). Her latest book, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China and Hong Kong, 1842-1943 (University of California Press, 2013), will be published in July.

Professor Tang holds bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.