Program Recognizes 33 Scholars for Significant Work in Social Sciences and Humanities
NEW YORK, NY, April 19, 2016––Continuing its longstanding investment in the social sciences and humanities, Carnegie Corporation of New York announced 33 winners of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program today with awards from the philanthropic foundation totaling $6.6 million.
The fellows will provide new perspectives on topics such as firearms and justifiable homicide, economic and demographic shifts in rural America, the abolition of prisons, the process for selecting judges, the impact of economic growth on climate change, the resettlement of refugees and asylum seekers, the adaptation of Islam in Western societies, the future of the Middle East, and famine in the 20th century.
The fellows were selected based on the originality, promise, and potential impact of their proposals. Each will receive up to $200,000 toward the funding of one to two years of scholarly research and writing aimed at addressing some of the world’s most urgent challenges to U.S. democracy and international order.
The program supports both established and emerging scholars, journalists, and authors whose work distills knowledge, enriches our culture, and equips leaders in the realms of education, law, technology, business, and public policy.
“Our founder, Andrew Carnegie, charged Carnegie Corporation with the task of creating, advancing, and diffusing knowledge in order to enlighten American society and strengthen our democracy. This outstanding new cohort of 33 Carnegie Fellows is a result of that mandate,” said Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York. “While there are many excellent fellowship and scholarly opportunities in our nation, what distinguishes the Carnegie Fellows is the broad range of their scholarship, as well as the program’s thorough selection process. The nominators, evaluators, and jurors, all of whom are prominent scholars and academic leaders, gave their time and dedication to support this initiative and these exceptional fellows.”
The nominating process entailed three levels of review. It began with the Corporation seeking recommendations from more than 600 leaders representing a range of universities, think tanks, publishers, and nonprofit organizations nationwide. These leaders nominated some 200 candidates, whose proposals were evaluated by an anonymous team of prominent scholars, educators, and intellectuals. The final selections were made by a distinguished panel of 16 jurors, including heads of the country’s premier scholarly institutions and presidents of leading universities and foundations.
“We reviewed proposals from the nation’s preeminent scholars and thinkers, as well as from the next generation of promising thinkers and writers. This year’s fellows represent a remarkable range of institutions and organizations, and all share a determination to bring new insights to their fields of study,” said Susan Hockfield, President Emerita of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who chaired the panel of jurors. “The large number of truly outstanding proposals makes the jury’s task difficult, but it also renews our confidence that social science and humanistic perspectives will—and must—contribute to designing solutions to today’s most complex challenges.”
The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program provides the most prestigious and most generous fellowships advancing research in the social sciences and humanities. The anticipated result of each fellowship is the publication of a book or major study.
2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellows and Proposals
Séverine Autesserre, Associate Professor of Political Science, Barnard College; “International Peacebuilding and Local Success: Assumptions, Myths, and Reality”
Deborah Balk, Professor, Baruch College, The City University of New York; “Climate-Related Vulnerability in the 21st Century and the Roles of Urbanization and Migration”
Gabriella Blum, Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Harvard University; “The Fog of Victory”
John R. Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences Sociocultural Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis; “Islam Adapting in the West”
Curtis A. Bradley, William Van Alstyne Professor of Law; Professor of Public Policy Studies, Duke University; “Comparative Foreign Relations Law and Democratic Accountability”
Kate Brown, Professor, University of Maryland, Baltimore County: “Chernobyl's Pale: Health, Controversy, and Science in Determining the Contours of Nuclear Disaster”
Margaret Burnham, Professor of Law, Northeastern University; “Racism and Justice in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Counting and Reckoning”
Mark Danner, Professor, University of California, Berkeley; “The Breaking of the Borders”
Lawrence Douglas, James J. Grosfeld Professor and Chair of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Amherst College; “A Jurisprudence of Atrocity”
Joshua A. Dubler, Assistant Professor of Religion, University of Rochester; “Why not Prison Abolition?”
M. Taylor Fravel, Associate Professor of Political Science; Member of the Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; “Preventing Conflict in Asia’s Maritime Disputes”
Matthew Fuhrmann, Associate Professor of Political Studies; Director of Graduate Studies, Texas A&M University; “Strategic Stability and the Diffusion of Nuclear Technology”
María Cristina García, Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies, Cornell University; “Climate Refugees: The Environmental Origins of Refugee Migrations”
Daniel K. Gardner, Dwight W. Morrow Professor of History, Smith College; “Imagining an Ecological Civilization: China's Environmental Turn in the 21st Century”
Charles G. Geyh, John F. Kimberling Professor of Law, Indiana University; “Lies, Damn Lies, and Judicial Elections: Transcending the Shrill Public Policy Debate over Judicial Selection in America”
Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of European and Eurasian Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan; “The Dictator's Curse? Authoritarian Party Collapse and the Nation State”
Jens Hainmueller, Associate Professor of Political Science; Associate Professor of Political Economics in the Graduate School of Business; Faculty Co-Director of the Stanford Immigration and Integration Policy Lab, Stanford University; “What Works for Promoting Integration? A Quasi-Experimental Study of Refugee and Asylum Policies in Europe and the US”
C. Kirabo Jackson, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy; Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University; “Identifying Excellent Teachers”
Kenneth Johnson, Senior Demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy; Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire; “Challenges to American Democracy: The Changing Demographic Structure of Rural America and its Implications”
Marwan M. Kraidy, Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture; Director, Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication, University of Pennsylvania; “The Spectacle of Islamic State: War Machines in the Era of Global Communication”
Marc Lynch, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs; Director, Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS), George Washington University; “Violence and the New Arab Public”
Mark Fathi Massoud, Associate Professor, Politics and Legal Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz; “Human Rights and Islamic States: Can Religion Rebuild the Rule of Law After War?”
Maribel Morey, Assistant Professor, Clemson University; “Big Philanthropy in the Lives of Black Americans: What Today's Foundations Can Learn from this History”
Christopher M. Nichols, Assistant Professor, Oregon State University; “American Isolationism”
William Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics & Professor, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University; “Economic modeling of irreversible and path-dependent processes in climate change”
Nathaniel Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law, Stanford University; “The Campaign of the Future”
Beryl Satter, Professor, Rutgers University-Newark; “Economic Democracy from the Bottom Up: ShoreBank, Uneven Development, and the Paradoxes of Race, Community and Financialization, 1973-2010”
Harel Shapira, Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Austin; “The Right to Kill: Guns, Justified Homicide, and the Future of American Democracy”
Landry Signé, Associate Professor, University of Alaska Anchorage; “Why African Nations Fail and How to Fix It: The Political Economy of Economic Growth and Democratic Development”
Katharine Sims, Assistant Professor of Economics, Amherst College; “Balancing Land Conservation and Development in the Long Term”
Jenny Leigh Smith, Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology; “Famine in the 20th Century: A Global History”
Vesla Weaver, Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies, Yale University; “The Faces of American Democracy”
Thomas Weiss,Presidential Professor, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York; “A World Without the United Nations”
Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program Jurors
Susan Hockfield, Chair, Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program Jurors; President Emerita, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; President-elect, American Association for the Advancement of Science
Ralph Cicerone, President, National Academy of Sciences
Jared Cohon, President Emeritus, Carnegie Mellon University
Mary Sue Coleman, President Emerita, University of Michigan; President-elect, Association of American Universities
John J. DeGioia, President, Georgetown University
Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, Institute for Advanced Study
Jonathan Fanton, President, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Amy Gutmann, President, University of Pennsylvania
Rush Holt, Chief Executive Officer, American Association for the Advancement of Science
Alberto Ibargüen, President and CEO, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Ira Katznelson, President, Social Science Research Council
Arthur Levine, President, The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation
Earl Lewis, President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Don Randel, Chair of the Board, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Louise Richardson, Vice-Chancellor, University of Oxford
Pauline Yu, President, American Council of Learned Societies
Throughout its more than 100-year history, the Corporation has supported many individual scholars and their research. In the 1930s, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma had a significant impact on race relations, and was influential in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Corporation funded the early works of major scholars such as Robert Caro, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker, as well as Martin Feldstein, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
More recently, between 2000 and 2009, the Corporation supported the Carnegie Scholars program, which awarded 168 fellowships to scholars across a broad range of disciplines, including 117 scholars with expertise on the challenges facing Islam and the Muslim world. Many of these scholars are now among the top experts in their fields.
Learn more about the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program and the work of the 2016 class, and follow news about the fellows at #CarnegieFellows.
About Carnegie Corporation of New York
Carnegie Corporation of New York was established in 1911 by Andrew Carnegie to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. In keeping with this mandate, the Corporation's work focuses on the issues that Andrew Carnegie considered of paramount importance: international peace, the advancement of education and knowledge, and the strength of our democracy.
