Four Women Appointed to Named Professorships at MIT

The School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has announced that nine faculty members have been appointed to named chairs. Four faculty members who identify as women are among the appointees.

Sana Aiyar was named the Class of 1948 Career Development Professor. She is an assistant professor of history at MIT who focuses on South Asia and the diaspora of South Asian people. She is the author of Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015). Dr. Aiyar is a graduate of Delhi University in India. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge in England and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Catherine Clark, an assistant professor of French studies, was appointed the Class of 1947 Development Professor. A cultural historian specializing in 19th- and 20th-century France, she is working on a book entitled Paris and the Cliché of History. Dr. Clark is a graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. She holds a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York City and a second master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Amy Finkelstein was appointed the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor in the department of economics. She also serves as the co-director of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economics Research. Dr. Finkelstein is a member of the Institute for Medicine and the American Academy of Arts ans Sciences. She has been on the faculty at MIT since 2005. Professor Finkelstein is s summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Oxford in England and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT.

Deborah Fitzgerald, a professor of the history of technology and the former dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at MIT, was named the Leverett Howell Cutten ’07 and William King Cutten ’39 Professor. Her research is focused on the emergence of technology in 20th-century American agriculture. Professor Fitzgerald is the author of The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois, 1890-1940 (Cornell University Press, 1990) and Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (Yale University Press, 2003). Dr. Fitzgerald is a graduate of Iowa State University. She earned a Ph.D. in history and the sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania.