University of Illinois scholar Rebecca Sandefur’s work on bringing broader access to civil justice is the kind of in-the-weeds scholarship that can fuel a full and effective academic career, but it can also pass largely unnoticed by the broader culture.
Giving great work a boost is one of the reasons the MacArthur Foundation developed its annual MacArthur Fellowships, better known as the “genius grants.” The Chicago philanthropy this year is delivering its $625,000 badge of recognition to people including a small-newspaper investigative journalist looking at the deeper costs of coal in West Virginia, a first-generation Nigerian-American choreographer exploring the interior lives of women and an analytical chemist whose work helps cancer surgeons differentiate diseased from healthy tissue.
In the awards announced Thursday, the foundation is giving the prize to 25 people across the United States, “individuals on the precipice of a great discovery or a game-changing idea,” says the foundation. Each one will receive their bounty over the next five years, with no strings attached except for the requirement that they pay taxes on it.
Several of the 2018 honorees have ties to Chicago, including playwright Dominique Morisseau, whose Detroit-set plays have been staged here, composer Matthew Aucoin, who apprenticed at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and writer John Keene, who taught at Northwestern.
But Sandefur, a 47-year-old sociologist on the university’s law school and sociology faculties, is the only winner currently working here.
“My reaction was shock,” she said, reached by phone this week in Champaign. “You just don’t expect something like this to happen. And then you feel really humble because you think of all of the incredible things people are doing.”
But she is grateful that civil justice — the noncriminal side of the law including areas such as housing, employment and family relationships — might get some needed focus, considering how frequently people have what she terms civil justice problems.
Part of her aim has been to find ways to settle such issues without simply moving more attorneys into the mix, using, for instance, nonlawyers who might nonetheless have some training in landlord-tenant law.
Sandefur’s work, MacArthur said in its citation, “is providing the empirical evidence necessary to guide and implement wide-scale reforms to address the civil legal needs of low-income people.”
“I don’t think criminal justice has been hogging the limelight,” said Sandefur, who earned her doctorate at the University of Chicago. “Criminal justice is a mess; the attention it gets, it needs. But there are challenges on the civil side, and I’m looking forward to that getting the attention it needs too.”
To that end, she said, she intends to put her prize money where her research is. “This is seed money to mobilize bigger activity on these issues,” Sandefur said.
Following are capsule descriptions of the other 24 winners, seven of whom are based in New York City. Fourteen have degrees from and/or faculty positions at Ivy League universities. More detailed information is at www.macfound.org.
Dominique Morisseau, 40, New York City: “No American playwright has risen faster,” Tribune critic Chris Jones wrote in reviewing February’s production of Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew” at the Northlight Theater in Skokie. It is the third part of her “Detroit Project” play cycle, which has drawn comparison’s to August Wilson’s Pittsburgh-set works.
John Keene, 53, Newark, N.J.: Working in fiction, translation, poetry and cultural criticism, Keene, chair of Rutgers University’s Department of African American and African Studies, “is correcting and enlarging our distorted, partial views of American history and culture,” the foundation said.
Matthew Aucoin, 28, New York City: The composer (of the 2015 operas “Crossing” and “Second Nature”), conductor and pianist, founder of the American Modern Opera Company, has had work performed at Chicago’s Lyric Opera and from 2013 to 2015 was the CSO’s Solti Conducting Apprentice.
Wu Tsang, 36, New York City: Tsang, whose undergraduate degree is from Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, is a filmmaker and performance artist exploring the lines between fiction and documentary in such works as “Dulian” and “Wildness,” the latter exploring an immigrant gay bar in LA.
Okwui Okpokwasili, 46, New York City: In works such as “Bronx Gothic” and “Poor People’s TV Room” (recently at the MCA), choreographer Okpokwasili’s multidisciplinary pieces draw viewers into the interior lives of women of color.
Julie Ault, 60, New York City: As an artist, curator and co-founder of the art collective Group Material, Ault has championed work that pushes for social change.
William J. Barber II, 55, Goldsboro, N.C.: Based in Goldsboro’s Greenleaf Christian Church, where he is pastor, and through “Moral Monday” marches outside the state capitol, he has advocated for causes including LGBTQ rights and voter enfranchisement.
Clifford Brangwynne, 40, Princeton, N.J.: Brangwynne, a Princeton biophysical engineer, studies cellular compartmentalization, work that “has the potential to shed light on biochemical malfunctions that can lead to disease,” MacArthur said.
Natalie Diaz, 40, Tempe, Ariz.: Mojave American and Latina, the poet Diaz, an English professor at Arizona State, wrote the 2012 poetry collection “When My Brother Was an Aztec.”
Ken Ward Jr., 50, Charleston, W. Va.: Writing for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, a newspaper that was sold in bankruptcy earlier this year, and now for the ProPublica Local Reporting Network, Ward has illuminated sometimes unseen impacts on people and the environment of coal, chemical and natural gas extraction in his home state.
Livia S. Eberlin, 32, Austin, Texas: Eberlin, an analytical chemist at the University of Texas, uses mass spectrometry to improve the accuracy of cancer diagnoses and surgeries.
Deborah Estrin, 58, New York City: A computer science professor at Cornell Tech, Estrin works to put the “small data” gathered in our digital lives to use in improving, for instance, personal health management.
Amy Finkelstein, 44, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT health economist uses novel research to show “hidden complexities” in health care and suggest future fixes.
Gregg Gonsalves, 54, New Haven, Conn.: An early ACT UP activist now on faculty as an epidemiologist at Yale, Gonsalves uses data to develop HIV/AIDS treatment plans and advocacy to help put such plans into practice.
Vijay Gupta, 31, Los Angeles: First violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gupta co-founded Street Symphony, which brings music and music education to nontraditional places.
Becca Heller, 36, New York City: A human rights lawyer who directs the International Refugee Assistance Project, Heller works to provide legal protection to refugee and other at-risk populations.
Raj Jayadev, 43, San Jose, Calif.: Jayadev, a community organizer and writer, created the now-spreading “participatory defense” model that gives more agency to people facing incarceration, their families and their communities.
Titus Kaphar, 42, New Haven, Conn.: Kaphar is “an artist whose paintings, sculptures and installations explore the intersection of art, history, and civic agency,” the foundation said.
Kelly Link, 49, Northampton, Mass.: Fiction writer and publisher Link melds science fiction and horror into emotionally realistic short stories such as those collected in 2015’s “Get in Trouble.” She and her husband run Small Beer Press.
Kristina Olson, 37, Seattle: Olson, a psychologist at University of Washington, is leading the first large-scale, long-running study of transgender and gender-nonconforming children.
Lisa Parks, 51, Cambridge, Mass.: A media scholar at MIT, Parks studies the impact of information technologies as they spread across the globe.
Allan Sly, 36, Princeton, N.J.: Sly, a Princeton mathematician, is using probability theory to work at resolving open problems in theoretical computer science and statistical physics.
Sarah Stewart, 45, Davis, Calif.: A planetary scientist at University of California at Davis, Stewart studies high-energy impacts on bodies such as planets and has advanced a novel theory for how Earth’s moon was formed.
Doris Tsao, 42, Pasadena, Calif.: Neuroscientist Tsao is conducting research at California Institute of Technology leading to new insights into how primates recognize faces, which could aid understanding of many other “sensory-processing functions.”
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Twitter @StevenKJohnson
