Dorothy E. Roberts Named 2024 MacArthur Fellow

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology & Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, has been named a 2024 MacArthur Fellowby the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The MacArthur Fellowship is a five-year grant to individuals who show exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits.

“Dorothy Roberts’ groundbreaking work at the intersections of law, race, and social justice has profoundly impacted scholarship, public policy, and political mobilization,” says Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law Sophia Lee. “Her recognition as a 2024 MacArthur Fellow is fitting for a scholar who has reframed debates on critical issues ranging from child welfare to the biological basis of race. We are incredibly proud of her achievements and fortunate to have her as a faculty member at Penn Carey Law.”

Roberts is the first Penn Carey Law community member to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” since restorative justice attorney sujatha baliga L’99 was chosen in 2018. Esteemed civil rights and criminal defense attorney, Senior Fellow David Rudovsky, was awarded a genius grant in 1986.

The Fellowship is designed to provide recipients with the flexibility to pursue their own artistic, intellectual, and professional activities in the absence of specific obligations or reporting requirements. Fellows are nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and are considered by an anonymous selection committee.

Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems. Her work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for a wholesale transformation of existing systems.

“I am extremely honored to receive a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship,” said Roberts. “It is my hope this award will shine a light on Black women’s visions and struggles for reproductive and family justice.”

“The transformative scholarship of Dorothy Roberts focuses on some of the most pressing issues facing our society, addressing issues of inequality, social justice, and race,” said Interim President J. Larry Jameson. “As a scholar, award-winning author, and now MacArthur Fellow, she exemplifies Penn’s commitment to impactful, interdisciplinary, creative pursuits.”

Roberts’ major books include Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2001); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011); and 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 scholarly articles and essays in books and journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.

Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Harvard Program in Ethics & the Professions, Stanford Center for the Comparative Study of Race & Ethnicity, Northwestern Institute for Policy Research, and the Fulbright Program. Recent recognitions of her work include elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine. She holds an Honorary Doctor of Law degree from Rutgers University, an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland,  received the Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award, and an American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.

[SOURCE: UPENN.LAW]

Princeton Professor Ruha Benjamin awarded MacArthur ‘genius’ grant

Ruha Benjamin, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, has been awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship(Link is external) for “illuminating how technology reflects and reproduces social inequality and championing the role of imagination in social transformation.”

“By integrating critical analysis of innovation with attentiveness to the potential for positive change, Benjamin demonstrates the importance of imagination and grassroots activism in shaping social policies and cultural practices,” the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation said in its announcement.

Benjamin is one of 22 MacArthur Fellows in the 2024 cohort, a group of scientists, artists, scholars, and activists who will each receive an $800,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation over a five-year period. The prestigious fellowships, known informally as “genius grants,” recognize individuals who have demonstrated “exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits.”

“Ruha Benjamin’s innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship has brought critical new perspectives to our understanding of racial and social inequities in technology, science, and medicine,” said Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber. “Professor Benjamin is a strikingly original and creative thinker, writer, and educator who inspires her students and readers.”

In her scholarship, Benjamin studies the social dimensions of science, medicine and technology. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2014 and is currently on sabbatical.

She is a 2017 recipient of the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab(Link is external). She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) from 2016 to 2017.

Her research has been published in journals such as Science, the American Journal of Law & Medicine, and Science, Technology, & Human Values. Benjamin was among the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Fund’s inaugural cohort of Freedom Scholars in 2020. 

She is also an award-winning author and popular speaker who has delivered talks on both the TED and TEDx stages and has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and The Guardian, among other publications.

Her most recent book, “Imagination: A Manifesto(Link is external)” (Norton, 2024), showcases artists, educators and activists in a narrative that she has called “a proclamation of the power of the imagination.” Her acclaimed 2022 book, “Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want(Link is external)” (Princeton University Press) won the 2023 Stowe Prize for Literary Activism, which recognizes “a distinguished book of general adult fiction or nonfiction whose written work illuminates a critical social justice issue in the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”

Benjamin is also the author of “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code(Link is external)” (Polity, 2019) and “People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier(Link is external)” (Stanford University Press, 2013). She is the editor of “Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life(Link is external)” (Duke University Press, 2019). 

Benjamin received her B.A. in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California-Berkeley.

She completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society. She was an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University before joining Princeton.

In addition to her tenure at IAS, she has received fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

“MacArthur Fellows are nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee,” according to the foundation’s announcement of 2024 fellows.

[SOURCE: PRINCETON.EDU/NEWS]