Three ACLS Awardees Named 2024 MacArthur Fellows

Three ACLS awardees have been named 2024 MacArthur Fellows. On October 1, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced 22 “exceptionally creative people” as its latest cohort of Fellows, each to receive grants of $800,000. Among them are:

Ruha Benjamin F’12, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American studies at Princeton University, where she specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and social inequity. Her books include Imagination: A Manifesto (Norton 2024) and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton University Press 2022), winner of the 2023 Stowe Prize. In 2012, she was awarded an ACLS Fellowship for her project “Provincializing Science: Mapping and Marketing Ethnoracial Diversity in the Genomic Age,” which explored how science shapes and is shaped by society. She also appeared at the 2024 ACLS Annual Meeting as a featured panelist for “Collaborations in the Humanities and Sciences.”

Shailaja Paik F’20, a historian of modern India exploring the intersection of caste, gender, and sexuality through the lives of Dalit (“Untouchable”) women. She is the Charles Phelphs Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History and Affiliate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She received a 2020 Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars for her research project “Becoming ‘Vulgar’: Caste Domination and Normative Sexuality in Modern India,” a multisite and microhistorical analysis of how Indians of various castes and classes paid intensive attention to managing social danger and moral disorder to make “decent” communities. That research contributed to her book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford University Press, 2022), which won the American Historical Association’s 2023 John F. Richards Prize for “the most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asia” and the Association of Asian Studies 2024 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize.

Dorothy Roberts F’15, a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems. She is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society. She received a 2015 ACLS Fellowship for her project “Interracial Marriage and Racial Equality in Chicago, 1937-1967.” Her writing includes Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022), as well as more than 100 articles and essays in books and journals, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book.

These scholars join 44 distinguished ACLS fellows and grantees who have also received MacArthur awards, listed by year below. ACLS funding often represents an early investment in the careers of scholars whose path-breaking work will go on to win other prestigious awards.

Read more about the work of these scholars and the other 2024 MacArthur Fellows here.

2024:
Ruha Benjamin F’12
Shailaja Paik F’20
Dorothy Roberts F’15

2021:
Nicole Fleetwood F’16

2019:
Elizabeth Anderson F’13
Emily Wilson F’05

2017:
Viet T. Nguyen F’11
Derek Peterson F’16

2016:
Kellie Jones F’94

2015:
Marina A. Rustow F’09, F’14

2014:
Tara Zahra F’09, F’13

2007: 
Jay Rubenstein F’02, F’06

2003:
Guillermo Algaze G’89

2000:
Laura Otis F’97

1999:
David Levering Lewis G’72
Jacqueline Jones G’77, F’95

1998:
Bernadette Brooten G’92
Edward Hirsch F’81

1996:
Rebecca Goldstein F’82
Peter Galison F’08

1995:
Patricia Nelson Limerick F’89
Joel Rogers F’86 

1992:
Suzanne Lebsock G’78
Ann Ellis Hanson F’82

1991:
Lewis Hyde F’03
Harlan Lane G’74
Arnold Rampersad G’80, F’02

1988:
Ruth Behar F’97
Susan Irene Rotroff G’80, ’84

1987:
Irving Howe G’73

1986:
Caroline Bynum F’78
William A. Christian G’75, F’80
Nancy Farriss G’71
David Keightley F’72,’75,’83,’84
George Perle G’69

1985:
John F. Benton G’64
Thomas G. Palaima F’83

1984:
John E. Toews G’83
Bret Wallach G’81

1983:
A.K. Ramanujan G’73 

1982:
Peter Brown F’80
Robert Darnton G’82

1981:
Lawrence Rosen F’77
Elaine H. Pagels G’77
Richard Rorty F’69
Carl Schorske F’63