Ten Women With Ties to the Academic World Named MacArthur Fellows

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently announced the 22 latest recipients in its fellowship program, commonly referred to as “genius grants.” MacArthur fellows receive a grant of $800,000 over five years to spend however they want on their academic or creative endeavors. Winners have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more.

Of this year’s 22 winners, 10 are women scholars with ties to the academic world.

(L to R) Loka Ashwood, Ruha Benjamin, Nicola Dell, Ling Ma, and Jennifer L. Morgan

Loka Ashwood is an associate professor in the department of sociology at the University of Kentucky. She served as an assistant professor at Auburn University in Alabama from 2015 to 2020. Her research is focused on the intersection of environmental injustice, corporate and state power, and anti-government sentiment in American rural communities. She is the author of For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America (Yale University Press, 2018).

Dr. Ashwood earned a bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She holds a master’s degree from University of Galway in Ireland, and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. Dr. Benjamin is a transdisciplinary scholar and writer illuminating how advances in science, medicine, and technology reflect and reproduce social inequality. She is the author of several books including Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019).

Professor Benjamin received a bachelor’s degree from Spelman College in Atlanta. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Since 2016, Nicola Dell has been a faculty member in the department of information science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, where she is currently an associate professor. She is also the director of technological innovation for the Initiative on Home Care Work in the Center for Applied Research on Work at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her research concentrates on developing technology interventions to address the specific needs and concerns of overlooked populations, in particular survivors of intimate partner violence and home healthcare workers.

Dr. Dell is a graduate of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

Ling Ma will join the University of Chicago faculty in 2025 as an associate professor in the department of English language and literature. She is a fiction writer mixing speculative and realist modes of storytelling to reflect on the systems that structure our lives in a globalized, capitalist era. She is the author of the apocalyptic novel Severance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).

Professor Ma earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and a master of fine arts degree from Cornell University.

Jennifer L. Morgan is a professor in the department of social and cultural analysis at New York University. She ia the author of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Reckoning With Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021).

Dr. Morgan is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

(L to R) Martha Muñoz, Shailaja Paik, Ebony G. Patterson, Wendy Red Star, and Dorothy Roberts

Martha Muñoz joined the faculty of the department of biological sciences at Virginia Tech in 2017, then moved to the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University in 2019, where she is an assistant professor. Dr. Muñoz is also an assistant curator in the Division of Vertebrate Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum and affiliate faculty at the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies. Her research with reptiles, amphibians, and fishes yields novel insights into the impact of behavior and biomechanics on evolution.

Dr. Muñoz is a graduate of Boston University. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Shailaja Paik is a historian of modern India exploring the intersection of caste, gender, and sexuality through the lives of Dalit (“Untouchable”) women. Since 2010, Dr. Paik has been affiliated with the University of Cincinnati, where she is currently the Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies. Her most recent book is The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford University Press, 2022).

Professor Paik holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Pune in India. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England.

Ebony G. Patterson is a multimedia artist creating intricate, densely layered, and visually dazzling works that center the culture and aesthetics of postcolonial spaces. Patterson’s practice includes painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture, textiles, and installation. She has taught at the University of Virginia, Edna Manley College in Kingston, Jamaica, the University of Kentucky, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Patterson received a bachelor of fine arts degree  from Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts and a master of fine arts degree from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Wendy Red Star is a visual artist engaging with archival materials in works that challenge colonial historical narratives. She has served as a visiting lecturer at Yale University, the Banff Center, National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the California Institute of the Arts.

Red Star received a bachelor’s degree from Montana State University and a master of fine arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dorothy Roberts is 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 and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the university’s law school, and holds faculty appointments in the departments of Africana studies and sociology. Professor Roberts’ work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She is the author of several books including Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022).

Professor Roberts is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School.

Photos courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation