Four Women Granted Tenure at MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Paloma Duong has been earned tenure as an associate professor in the comparative media studies and writing program. An MIT faculty member for nearly a decade, she researches and teaches modern and contemporary Latin American culture. She has authored numerous scholarly publications, including her most recent book, Portable Postsocialisms New Cuban Mediascapes After the End of History (University of Texas Press, 2024).

Dr. Duong is a graduate of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She holds two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York City.

Amy Moran-Thomas has earned tenure as associate professor of anthropology. As a scholar, she studies how health technologies and ecologies are designed and come to be materially embodied — often inequitably — by people in their ordinary lives. Her research led her to authoring her first book, Traveling With Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic (University of California Press, 2019).

Dr. Moran-Thomas is a summa cum laude graduate of American University in Wasington, D.C., where she majored in literature. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in anthropology from Princeton University in New Jersey

Bettina Stoetzer has earned tenure as an associate professor of anthropology. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, globalization, and social justice in the United States and Germany. She has edited and authored several books, most recently Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2022).

Dr. Stoetzer received her masters degree in sociology, anthropology, and media studies from the University of Goettingen in Germany and her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Ariel White has earned tenure as an associate professor in the department of political science. Her academic work focuses on voting and voting rights, race, the criminal legal system, and bureaucratic behavior. When conducting research, she uses large datasets to measure individual-level experiences and shed light on people’s everyday interactions with government.

Dr. White is a summa cum laude graduate of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she majored in government and economics. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.