| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji | | | Institution: | Harvard University; Santa Fe Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Mahzarin Banaji is currently Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology of Harvard University, Senior Advisor to Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She earned her Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 1986. She taught at Yale University, including as Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology, before moving to Harvard University and the Santa Fe Institute. At Harvard she has held the titles of Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Harvard College Professor; she was George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics, at the Santa Fe Institute.
Mahzarin Banaji pioneered the science of automatic stereotyping. She developed with Greenwald a theory, rigorous evidence, and widely-used measure of implicit associations between social groups (e.g., gender, race) and evaluative valence. These rapid associations (ingroup = good, outgroup = bad) may contradict people’s conscious rejection of prejudice. Nevertheless, implicit association tests are reliable and valid, correlate with relevant neural activations (e.g., amygdala), and predict behavior—especially for politically sensitive issues—sometimes better than do explicit attitudes. Banaji’s recent work traces their origins to cultural exposure in childhood. Laboratory experiments demonstrate that immediate associations are under bounded control. Because individuals cannot reliably monitor bias, Banaji develops legal and ethical implications: social systems can better detect patterns of bias. Often unaware of bias, people may even justify a system biased against their own group. Through tireless public outreach, Banaji educates business, law, and education organizations about unconscious bias and its inadvertent waste of human capital.
Mahzarin Banaji has won a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association in 2007 and William James Fellow Award of the Association for Psychological Science in 2016. She is a charter member of the American Psychological Society (now Association for Psychological Science), which she joined in 1988, was secretary from 1997-99, and was president from 2010-11. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2008), the British Academy (2015), and the National Academy of Sciences (2018). She authored (with A. Greenwald) Blindspot: Hidden biases of good people, 2016. Mahzarin Banaji was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Joyce E. Chaplin | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1960 | | | | | | |
Joyce Chaplin is currently James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. She earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1986, after which she spent a decade and a half at Vanderbilt University before moving to Harvard.
Joyce Chaplin is a wide-ranging and innovative historian of early America who has made a special study of Benjamin Franklin, colonialism, and environment. Her interests include the oceans as trading routes and she has occasionally taught in a maritime studies program. She is director of the American Studies program at Harvard. Her book, Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (2012), has been translated into several languages. She is perhaps best known for her biography, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006). Other interests include historical food studies. She is currently a Guggenheim Fellow working on a history of resource conservation, climate change, and settler colonialism, “The Franklin Stove: Heat and Life in the Little Ice Age.”
Joyce Chaplin has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2006) and the Sidney N. Zubrow Award of the Pennsylvania Hospital (2006). She is a member of the American Antiquarian Society (2007), Massachusetts Historical Society (fellow & trustee 2008), and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts (2011). In addition to those mentioned earlier, her works include: An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993; Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676, 2001; Benjamin Franklin's Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity, 2009; Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Norton Critical Edition, 2012; (edited with with P. Freedman, K. Albala) Food in Time and Place, 2014; (edited with D. McMahon) Genealogies of Genius, 2015; (with A. Bashford) The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population, 2016. Joyce Chaplin was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Alondra Nelson | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study; President, Social Science Research Council | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 301. Anthropology, Demography, Psychology, and Sociology | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1968 | | | | | | |
Noted for her talent as both a transformative leader and a pathbreaking scholar, Nelson is President of the Social Science Research Council and the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). She joined the IAS faculty in 2019, following a decade at Columbia University, where she served as professor of sociology and the inaugural Dean of Social Science. Nelson was previously on the faculty of Yale University and there received the Poorvu Award for interdisciplinary teaching excellence. A sociologist of science, technology and social inequality, she is author, most recently, of the widely-acclaimed book, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations and Reconciliation after the Genome. Her groundbreaking books also include the award-winning work, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee), and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (with Thuy Linh Tu). Nelson’s writings and commentary also have reached the broader public through a variety of outlets. And she has contributed to national policy discussions on inequality and the implications of new technology on society.
She is a trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the Obama Presidency Oral History Advisory Board. Raised in Southern California, Nelson received her BA in 1994 from the University of California, San Diego, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her PhD from New York University in 2003. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Sociological Research Association. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. James C. Scott | | | Institution: | Yale University | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
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| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | | |
James C. Scott is currently Sterling Professor of Political Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Forest & Environmental Studies at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from that same institution in 1967. Between earning his Ph.D. and beginning to teach at Yale, he was Professor of Political Science from 1967-1976 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
James C. Scott began as an on-site-searcher in Southeast Asia, then expanded into works of general importance for political science, anthropology, and history. These works have reached wide audiences. How do ordinary people use "weapons of the weak" against political and economic elites? What is the nature of the "moral economy" that peasants abide by? How do central "seeing eye" states "read" their populations, and so what? In the U.S., a notable instance of that "reading" is the federal government's division of the continent into cadastral land plots in the 1780s courtesy of Thomas Jefferson. Scott has a warm view of anarchism, as seen in his recent Against the Grain. Why have powerful ancient city states like those in Central America risen and, perhaps for good reason, fallen?
Scott has won a number of prizes, among them the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2010, the Benjamin E. Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association in 2015, and the Prize of the Foundation Mattei Dogan of the International Political Science Association in 2018. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1978-79. His works include: The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, 1977; Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, 1987; Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, 1990; Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1999; The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, 2010; Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, 2017. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ( 1992) and the Association for Asian Studies (president, 1997). James C. Scott was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Alan Taylor | | | Institution: | University of Virginia | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | | | Residency: | resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
A graduate of Colby College (1977), Alan Taylor received his Ph.d in American History from Brandeis University in 1986. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Virginia)1985-1987, he taught at Boston University, 1987-1994; the University of California at Davis, 1994-2014; and the University of Virginia, where he holds the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair, 2014- .
Taylor has published nine books: Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820 (1990); William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early Republic, (1995); American Colonies (2001); Writing Early American History (2005); The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (2006); The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (2010); The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia (2013); American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (2016); Thomas Jefferson’s Education (2019).
William Cooper’s Town won the Bancroft, Beveridge, and Pulitzer Prizes. The Internal Enemy won the Pulitzer Prize for American history and the Merle Curti Prize for Social History (OAH). American Colonies won the 2001 Gold Medal for Non-Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. The Divided Ground won the 2007 Society for Historians of the Early Republic book prize and the 2004-7 Society of the Cincinnati triennial book prize. The Civil War of 1812 won the Empire State History Prize and was a finalist for the George Washington Prize.
His current book project, entitled, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, examines the social and political history of this nation, with an emphasis on territorial expansion and relations with Canada, Haiti, Mexico, and Native Americans.
For a dozen years, he served as the faculty advisor for the California State Social Science and History Project, which provides curriculum support and professional development for K-12 teachers in history and social studies. In 2002 he won the University of California at Davis Award for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement and the Phi Beta Kappa, Northern California Association, Teaching Excellence Award. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
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