A pair of alumni from the College of Letters & Science are recipients of a prestigious 2024 MacArthur Fellowship.
Loka Ashwood (Sociology PhD ’15) and Keivan Stassun (Astronomy MS ’99, PhD ’00), have been selected to receive MacArthur “Genius Grants,” a designation that includes an $800,000 stipend. Fellows are selected by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to acknowledge talented individuals in a variety of fields who have shown exceptional originality and demonstrated the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through the pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions.
Ashwood, whose PhD program was co-sponsored by the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Science’s Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, is being honored by the MacArthur Foundation for “shedding light on rural identity and culture and on the ecological, economic and social challenges facing many rural communities.”
As an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky, Ashwood examines the intersection of environmental injustice, corporate and state power, and anti-government sentiment in American rural communities. Ashwood’s research reveals how state support for some corporate interests can come at a high cost for rural residents. She draws from her own experience on her family’s farm and ethnographic research in rural communities facing ecological, economic and social challenges. By analyzing specific local issues in the context of larger institutional structures, she sheds light on rural identity, culture and politics. She is the author of the book, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America (2018), which looked at the government’s use of eminent domain to seize rural farmland in Burke County, Georgia. In her latest book, Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-by-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm (2023), Ashwood and her co-author look at the impact of Right to Farm laws on rural residents across the United States.
“Across America, in rural communities, you have resources being taken out, and the capacity to make money off of those resources is increasingly stripped away,” says Ashwood in a video posted to the MacArthur Fellows website. “And it’s sanctioned by the government in many cases, and so that’s where this antipathy towards the state, towards the government, is coming from.”
Stassun, the Stevenson Endowed Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt University with joint appointments in the University’s School of Engineering and the Owen Graduate School of Management, was selected by the MacArthur Foundation for “expanding opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and careers for underrepresented populations.”
Stassun’s research in astrophysics concerns star evolution and exoplanet discovery. He is responsible for creating two major initiatives aimed at helping underrepresented and neurodiverse students succeed in higher education and employment. He co-founded the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-PhD Bridge Program, an initiative that served as a steppingstone for promising master’s students at the historically Black Fisk University to pursue PhD work at Vanderbilt or other universities. And he founded the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation, an initiative that helps autistic and other neurodiverse individuals find and maintain meaningful employment. Participants learn practical work skills and identify their professional strengths. In addition, the Frist Center works with industry scholars and experts to create opportunities and policies that promote inclusion of neurodiverse employees.
“I am inspired to work to recognize and support creative scientific potential across the full spectrum of human diversity and difference,” Stassun states on the MacArthur Fellows website. “And I am motivated to work to identify and dismantle the barriers that would limit the access of the scientific enterprise to the talents of some, or that would deny to any the opportunity to participate in that enterprise.”
The College of Letters & Science has a strong record of accomplishment producing Genius Grant winners. Most recently, UW–Madison Professor of Geoscience Andrea Dutton was awarded one in 2019, and Professor of History Monica Kim received one in 2022.