The MacArthur geniuses, as they are colloquially called, are known for their intellectual prowess and innovative contributions to their respective fields. The 2017 cohort of awardees lives up to that legacy.
The MacArthur Fellowship, an annual grant funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, announced its selection of 24 individuals last week, a list that includes novelists, scientists, activists and artists from an array of different backgrounds. The award will gift a sum of $625,000 over a period of five years, giving the winners full discretion over how the funds are used. Diverse interviewed four of the awardees whose commitments to rigorous research and social justice make clear the wide range of scholars being celebrated by the Foundation.
“It gives me the freedom to do things on my own terms, which I think is really important to me as an artist,” said Dr. Tyshawn Sorey, an assistant professor of music at Wesleyan University who has earned prominence as a composer and a performer. As a label-evading musician, Sorey looks forward to completing collaborations commissioned by the Opera Philadelphia and Carnegie Hall. For another project called “Cycles of My Being,” which is inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, Sorey will be working with another MacArthur Fellow, poet Terrance Hayes.
The prestigious grant also alleviates some of the financial concerns that come with fieldwork, according to Dr. Jason De León, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. He was awarded the grant for his interdisciplinary work that blends forensic science, archeology and cultural anthropology to study and record the migrant experience in parts of the Southern United States and Latin America.
De León said that he finds the greatest reward in “being able to show people that anthropology is a really important tool to improve our understanding of the human condition, and in this particular instance, to improve our understanding of this poorly understood and highly polarizing issue of undocumented migration.”
His work documents the perilous journeys of undocumented individuals across the border to preserve the memory of their reality. De León argues that other monuments to immigration like Ellis Island have been “white-washed” by history to fit a dominant narrative.
“We sort of understand that some people understand that those great migrations were brutal, painful experiences, and the American public has largely romanticized Ellis Island, which is dangerous,” he explained.
