Andrew WhitacreThe Comparative Media Studies/Writing program is welcoming three new assistant professors this fall: Angela Saini, Rebekah Larsen, and Becca Lewis. Each brings distinct expertise to CMS/W, yet their work converges on how media systems shape knowledge, culture, and public life. Together, they expand our investigations into urgent questions around those systems in a rapidly changing world.
Communicating Science & Ideas: Angela Saini
Angela Saini joins CMS/W as Assistant Professor of Science Writing, bringing more than two decades of experience as a journalist and author. Her acclaimed books – including Inferior, Superior, and The Patriarchs – explore how ideas about human difference take hold, circulate, and influence policy. She is currently completing another book, which she describes as “looking at human classification” by states and institutions along definitions like race and sex. “We lean on these categories too much,” Saini says, arguing that leaning back out would result in better policymaking.
For Saini, the move to MIT is as much about community as it is about research. “Full-time book writing, which I’ve been doing for many years, can get lonely,” she explained. “I’m really looking forward to having a community around me, especially students.” Teaching has been “a revelation”: it keeps her connected to the changing media habits of today’s college-aged adults.
She says she already feels at home at MIT. “I just love the vibe of it. It’s one of the spaces that I felt most comfortable … partly that’s because I studied engineering myself … I find it very unpretentious as a place, very entrepreneurial. I love all of that.”
Media Systems & Power: Rebekah Larsen
Rebekah Larsen, a media sociologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, looks at understudied media ecosystems and how they evolve jn changing social and technological conditions. She combines ethnographic, historical, and computational methods to examine power in communication systems. One of her central projects focuses on local talk radio in rural Utah, where she grew up. “Looking at what functions these stations actually fill in those rural spaces,” Larsen says, “they are sources of news … they’ve been serving their communities for generations. They’re trusted.”
Trust is a theme in Larsen’s work studying fact-checking networks and newsroom responses to misinformation. She emphasizes that what she looks forward to at MIT is not only research but writing for broader audiences, beyond standard academic writing. “So I’m excited some of the writing prowess of people in the department will rub off on me.”
Her own experiences shape how she connects with students. While teaching an introductory course, she shared her background as someone from a family with little experience in higher education. “After I taught a lecture, I suddenly had all these students coming and talking to me about their experiences being first gen or low income,” she recalled. That led her to discover that MIT is among the most supportive elite schools for first-generation and low-income students. “For me, that’s really important to be in a space like this, and that’s something I’m really excited to be more involved in.”
Digital Culture & Politics: Becca Lewis
Becca Lewis, an interdisciplinary communication scholar, examines how politics and digital culture shape one another. With a Ph.D. from Stanford University, she has published widely on media manipulation and digital influence. At MIT, she is thinking historically about how today’s internet and high-tech industry took shape. “There were debates in the 90s,” she notes, when the debate was “would information dissemination be completely commercialized, or would there be a ‘public lane on the information highway’?” The deregulatory commercial vision won out. “What would a different internet look like,” Lewis asks, “one that’s built more around the public interest than the commercial interest?”
Lewis is embarking on her first book, calling the process “scary, but exciting.” But like Saini and Larsen, she’s eager to build community: “One of my absolute favorite things about academia is having a generative academic community,” a benefit of a transdisciplinary group like that in Comparative Media Studies/Writing. “I think that there’s such an exciting opportunity to build that here.”
She looks forward to MIT’s distinctive mix of humanities and technology. “At my interview, people mentioned that the School of Humanities, Arts, and, Social Sciences felt like a small liberal arts college within a broader university – being able to synthesize some of the humanities and social science pieces with the more technical ones.”
Strengthening CMS/W’s Mission
While their subjects range from global science writing to rural radio to online politics, all three newly minted assistant professors are motivated by a common drive: to understand how media systems shape knowledge and power and to share those insights with broader publics. They also embody CMS/W’s spirit – moving between sociology, journalism, history, communication, and more – in ways that enrich our culture.
As they settle in, Saini, Larsen, and Lewis are poised to bring fresh questions, new methods, and shared commitment to the public good. Their research, writing, and presence in the classroom will help CMS/W continue its mission to understand and shape media, communication, and storytelling in a changing world.
