Eight Yale faculty members are among 252 leaders elected as new members of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the academy announced this week.
The academy - an honorary society and independent policy organization with initiatives in the arts, democracy, education, global affairs, and science - elects new members each year in recognition of their notable achievements in academia, industry, policy, research, and science. This year's cohort also includes international honorary members from 14 countries.
New members who currently serve on the Yale faculty, and the areas of specialty for which they were recognized, include Leah Platt Boustan (economics); Daphne A. Brooks (performing arts); Erika J. Edwards (evolution and ecology); Vanessa Olivia Ezenwa (evolution and ecology); Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (literature); Lisa Lowe (literature and language studies); Joanne Meyerowitz (history); and Gideon Yaffe (humanities and arts).
"We celebrate the achievement of each new member and the collective breadth and depth of their excellence - this is a fitting commemoration of the nation's 250th anniversary," said Laurie Patton, the academy's president. "The founding of the nation and the Academy are rooted in the inextricable links between a vibrant democracy, the free pursuit of knowledge, and the expansion of the public good."
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and other early leaders of the new nation, the academy sought to recognize accomplished members of society and engage them in addressing the biggest challenges facing the country. Among the first members elected in 1781 were George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
New members from Yale:
Leah Platt Boustan is a professor of economics in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and director of the Economic History Program, whose research lies at the intersection between economic history and labor economics. She has worked on the Great Black Migration from the rural South during and after World War II and the mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her first book, "Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets" was honored by the Social Science History Association and the Economic History Association. Her second book, "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success," co-authored with Ran Abramitzky, was named among The New Yorker's Best Books of 2022 and Forbes' Best Business Books of 2022. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and serves as co-editor at the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
Daphne A. Brooks, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Black Studies, American Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music in FAS, is a scholar of African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She is the author of "Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910," which was the winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR; "Jeff Buckley's Grace"; and "Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound," which won the 2021 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award, the 2021 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Nonfiction, the 2022 Prose Award in Music & the Performing Arts, and the Popular Culture Association's Shaw and Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African American Popular Culture Studies.
Erika J. Edwards is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in FAS, curator of botany at the Yale Peabody Museum, and director of the Marsh Botanical Garden at Yale, and acting director of the Peabody Museum. Her research focuses on various problems in plant evolution, using a wide range of biological data to understand the many ways plant species have adapted their form and function over time. In her work, she integrates many types of biological data - quantifying everything from molecules to global climate - to build a complete picture of how and why plants have evolved such a diverse array of forms. Her lab is especially interested in how C4 and CAM photosynthesis - two complex plant adaptations to low carbon dioxide levels, hot temperatures, and drought - have evolved so frequently over time.
Vanessa Olivia Ezenwa, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in FAS, studies the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases in wild animals. In her research, she examines how interactions between hosts and pathogens occurring at the scale of individual organisms translate to broader ecological and epidemiological patterns, integrating perspectives from animal behavior, ecology, evolution, and immunology to make sense of complex infectious disease processes operating in natural populations. She was also recently elected as a fellow of the Ecological Society of America, was previously elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Fulbright Scholar Award, among others.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning playwright and a professor in the practice of theater and performance studies in FAS. His play "Purpose," which explores the complex dynamics within a prominent Black family in Chicago when the youngest son returns home with an uninvited guest, won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play last year. His play "Appropriate" also won a Tony Award, for Best Revival of a Play, in 2024. Jacobs-Jenkins, who is also a commissioned artist at Yale Repertory Theatre, joined the Yale faculty in 2021 and teaches playwrighting. His plays "Everybody" (Signature Theater) and "Gloria" (Vineyard Theater) were both Pulitzer finalists. In 2016, he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship.
Lisa Lowe, the Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies in FAS, is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on literatures and cultures of encounter that emerge from histories of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for her work on French and British colonialisms and postcolonial literature, Asian immigration and Asian American studies, race and empire, and comparative global humanities. She has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon foundations, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has authored books on Orientalism, immigration, and globalization, such as "Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms," "Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics," and the monograph "The Intimacies of Four Continents," among others.
Joanne Meyerowitz, the Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and professor of American studies in FAS, is a scholar of 20th-century U.S. history, women and gender, and sexuality. Her books include "Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930," "How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States," and "A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit," a history of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. She has received fellowships from, among others, the American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Humanities Center, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Social Science Research Council. At Yale she has served as chair of LGBT Studies, chair of American Studies, and acting chair of the Department of History. She is also co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.
Gideon Yaffe is the Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School, and professor of philosophy and of psychology in FAS. His research interests include the philosophy of law, particularly criminal law; the study of metaphysics including causation, free will, and personal identity; and the study of intention and the theory of action. He has also written about the history of early modern philosophy. He also collaborates with several neuroscientists to devise experiments that aim to be of legal and philosophical significance and has written about the relevance of the neuroscience of addiction to the criminal culpability of addicts. His 2010 book, "Attempts," concerns the philosophical foundations of the law governing attempted crimes, and his 2017 book, "The Age of Culpability," concerns the philosophical grounds for leniency towards child criminals. He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation, and he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015.
Other newly elected members include environmental scientist and GIS technologist Jack Dangermond; actor and filmmaker Jodie Foster '85; anthropologist and ethnographer John L. Jackson; author Barbara Kingsolver; actor, dancer, and singer Rita Moreno; computer scientist and entrepreneur Shwetak Patel; and Carol E. Quillen, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The new members will be inducted during a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October.
