In 2026, MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences granted tenure to five faculty members.
Volha Charnysh is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. She investigates how identity shapes state‑building and economic development and the impacts of violence. Her first book, Uprooted: How post‑WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2024), examines the lasting consequences of mass displacement and resulting cultural heterogeneity. She earned her PhD from Harvard in 2017 and joined MIT in 2018.
Grisha Coleman is a full professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. Her research explores tensions among physiological, technological, and ecological systems, as well as human movement, machines, and inhabited spaces. She adopts an interdisciplinary practice, holds an MFA in music composition and integrated media from CalArts, and joined MIT in 2026.
Tung‑Hui Hu is an associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program, a poet and digital‑media scholar. He has authored five books, including Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection (MIT Press, 2022). His work examines how concepts such as race and language become measurable, governable datasets. Hu earned a BA in comparative literature from Princeton, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in film studies from UC Berkeley, joining MIT in 2026.
Tobias Salz is an associate professor in the Department of Economics, focusing on industrial organization. He studies how digital platforms and intermediaries shape competition and market outcomes, with applications in digital markets, transportation, and artificial intelligence. His recent projects analyze market power in web search, personalized platform pricing, and collaboration between human experts and AI in medical diagnosis. Salz received his PhD in economics from NYU in 2016 and joined MIT in 2019.
Christian Wolf is an associate professor in the Department of Economics, researching how monetary and fiscal policy can stabilize the economy. He aims to learn directly from micro‑ and macro‑economic data rather than relying on structural models. Wolf joined MIT in 2021 after earning his PhD from Princeton.
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