Meet the 2026 Seoul Research Program faculty, part 2: humanities and social sciences
Seven professors from MIT, Penn, UChicago, Cambridge, Oxford, RISD, and USC: what each research course covers, sample questions, and the students it suits.
Programs & Faculty
What system-level obstacles do sustainability startups run into? How do international organizations respond when climate change becomes a security threat? Can a film turn a tangled environmental and social problem into a story that moves an audience? Questions like these drive the humanities and social sciences courses of the 2026 Seoul Research Program.
Each course is built around student research, not lectures. Students choose a question, investigate it with a professor's guidance, and finish with an academic poster presented to the professor and classmates; most courses add a written research paper. Part 1 of this series covered the STEM faculty. Here are the seven professors in the humanities and social sciences, with what each course covers, sample research questions, and who it suits.
At a glance
Professor
University
Course focus
Kit Hickey
MIT Sloan School of Management
Entrepreneurship and venture creation
William Burke-White
University of Pennsylvania
International law and global governance
Ryan Fang
University of Chicago
Economic modeling and game theory
Michael Ashby
University of Cambridge
Empirical and sustainable finance
Victoria Murphy
University of Oxford
Language learning and teaching
Ijlal Muzaffar
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
Architectural history and environmental design
James Savoca
USC School of Cinematic Arts
Filmmaking, screenwriting, and new media
Kit Hickey (MIT Sloan): building a venture step by step
Kit Hickey teaches entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her course, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Management: A Comprehensive Guide to Venture Creation, is built on MIT's well-known 24-step entrepreneurship framework and treats a startup as a system, from the first idea to a business model and growth strategy.
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Teams take a real or hypothetical venture through market research, customer discovery, prototype planning, and financial strategy, working out market segments, customer personas, and a competitive strategy along the way. Under Hickey's guidance they write interim reports on their business plan, then finish with a venture-analysis paper and a poster, presented the way founders pitch to investors. Teams that want to go further can also build a mock investor pitch or a full business plan.
Sample research questions:
What system-level challenges do startups tackling sustainability face?
How can founders test a startup idea with limited resources?
No startup experience is needed; the course starts from the basic concepts. It suits students interested in business, economics, or entrepreneurship who like to speak up and work in teams, including humanities and social science students who want a hands-on look at the business world.
William Burke-White (Penn): international law across borders
William Burke-White, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, looks at how states use international law to govern problems that cross borders, from climate change and pandemics to trade and security. Students learn how treaties and customary international law take shape, what bodies such as the UN and the WTO do, and how disputes are settled.
Much of the class runs on participatory formats such as mock international conferences and mock trials. Teams then run case studies, analyze the relevant legal provisions, and present a research paper and poster. Projects range from international legal responses to climate change to proposals for reforming the UN Security Council.
Sample research questions from the 2026 syllabus:
How does international law shape international environmental disputes?
How do international organizations respond to climate-related security threats?
No legal background is required, only an interest in current affairs and a willingness to debate. The course fits students drawn to international relations, law, or political science, including future lawyers and diplomats.
Ryan Fang (UChicago): modeling strategic decisions
Ryan Fang of the University of Chicago teaches strategic decision-making through microeconomics and game theory. Students learn to reduce the interactions among markets, firms, consumers, and governments to economic models, using rational choice theory, equilibrium analysis, and optimization.
The class then becomes a research workshop: each team picks an economic problem, writes a model-based paper, and presents and discusses its model at a poster session. One team might analyze how firms respond to environmental policy; another might model how irrational consumers move a market.
Sample research questions:
How do economic incentives affect cooperation over shared resources?
How do behavioral biases shift market equilibrium?
Calculus and basic economics help, but a high school economics course is enough, since Fang builds the core concepts from scratch. The course suits students of economics, business, or political economy who enjoy quantitative work, strategy games, and puzzles.
Michael Ashby (Cambridge): testing finance on real data
Michael Ashby, who teaches economics at the University of Cambridge, leads Empirical Finance: Capital Markets, Investment, and Asset Pricing. Students learn portfolio theory, the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), and the efficient market hypothesis, then test them against real financial data; the course also covers ESG investing, green finance, and climate risk.
In the second half, teams form a hypothesis and test it with econometric models. A project might be an event study of share prices around a climate policy announcement, an analysis of what drives green-bond yields, or a multiple regression on how ESG scores relate to firm value.
Sample research questions:
How are environmental risk factors reflected in asset prices?
How does investor irrationality affect market efficiency?
Basic math and some probability and statistics are required. Over the course, students build skills in processing data with programming, statistical inference, and economic interpretation. The course suits students interested in finance and data analysis, from future fund managers and analysts to anyone curious about the economics of climate change.
Victoria Murphy (Oxford): how language is learned and taught
Victoria Murphy, head of the Department of Education at the University of Oxford and a specialist in applied linguistics, teaches Language, Learning, and Teaching Across Educational Systems. The course asks how children learn language and how teachers teach it, covering multilingual development in multicultural classrooms, how teaching changes over a teacher's career, and how language-education policy reaches the classroom. Teams build research projects grounded in the literature. They can add interviews, surveys, or analysis of existing data, then present a research paper and poster at a small, conference-style session.
Sample research questions:
How does the learning environment affect students' ability to solve complex problems?
How does multilingual education affect cognitive flexibility?
No prior study of psychology or linguistics is needed. The course suits students interested in education, linguistics, psychology, or child development, including future teachers and education-policy specialists.
Ijlal Muzaffar (RISD): design history and environmental futures
Ijlal Muzaffar, an architectural historian at the Rhode Island School of Design, teaches Possible Modernities: Design Systems, Architecture, and Environmental Futures. Rather than treating architectural history as a record of the past, the course reads architecture and design within the environmental, material, and social systems that shaped them.
Students study Mesopotamian irrigation, water management in medieval cities, and industrial-age building materials to see how designers worked within limits of climate and resources. Teams mine a historical case for lessons in sustainable design, comparing, say, the urban infrastructure of ancient Rome and China, or tracing architectural styles along the Silk Road. They present their findings on a poster, with design drawings, at a closing exhibition.
Sample research questions:
How did modern urban planning affect environmental sustainability?
What can traditional architecture in non-Western societies teach contemporary design?
No background in architectural history is needed, since Muzaffar supplies the context. Because the course looks at modern architecture well beyond the West, it also rewards students interested in cultural history and aesthetics. It suits students of architecture, design, and history, including future art school and architecture applicants who want theory and history alongside studio work.
James Savoca (USC): film as a system
James Savoca teaches at USC's School of Cinematic Arts and specializes in storytelling and screenwriting. His 2026 course on next-generation filmmaking, covering screenwriting, the screen, and the future of new media, treats contemporary film as a system: how screenplay, image, sound, and editing combine to create meaning, and how those choices reflect their social and cultural context. Small groups write a research paper on a film topic and present a poster. They can also add creative work, such as a short screenplay or a storyboard, as long as it grows out of their research.
Sample research questions from the syllabus:
How can film turn complex environmental and social systems into emotionally compelling stories?
How do the constraints of low-budget filmmaking shape creative decisions?
Production or screenwriting experience helps but is not required. The course suits students who want to study the narrative and direction of films such as Bong Joon-ho's Parasite or Park Chan-wook's Oldboy as a scholar would, and future film, creative writing, and media students building a portfolio.
Research the way universities do it
In all seven courses, students pick a topic, investigate it, and see it through to finished work, guided by faculty from MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, RISD, and USC. The courses are taught in person in Seoul during the summer, in small groups. To see how the program is structured, explore the Seoul Research Program.
