Jason De León among 24 awarded $625,000 by MacArthur Foundation
Two University of Michigan researchers are among 24 people from a wide range of fields who have been awarded $625,000, no-strings-attached fellowships from the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation.
The so-called “genius grants” are awarded annually to people who have shown extraordinary talent and creativity.
Anthropologist Jason De León and historian Derek Peterson will each receive a $625,000 stipend to be used however they see fit over a period of five years. Both are in the U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
De León is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology who studies violence, materiality and the social process of migration between Latin America and the United States. He also directs the Undocumented Migration Project, a long-term study that focuses on different aspects of clandestine border crossings. The study uses ethnographic, archaeological, forensic and visual approaches to understand this phenomenon in places such as the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona, northern Mexican border towns and the southern Mexico/Guatemala border.
“I think this award is both an important recognition of the work itself and it makes a case that archeology can be a useful tool to study poorly understood social phenomena such as undocumented migration,” De León said in a statement. “This award was given to me in name, but I have many collaborators who worked on this project and who made this award possible, including a lot of University of Michigan undergraduate and graduate students.”
De León plans to use the award to fund ongoing and future offshoots of this research, including an ongoing project on smugglers as well as a new archeology and forensic project in Arizona to improve the ability to identify the bodies of migrants who have died in border crossings. He will also use the support to help fund a new touring museum multimedia exhibition tentatively titled “Hostile Terrain” that will use a combination of migrant artifacts and audio and video data to help people understand the migrant experience.
