“My research offers scholars, activists, and community organizers a new way to see race—as a rhetorical practice with historical roots that extend back well beyond the periods of Enlightenment science and American slavery to which it is often attached,” says Cord J. Whitaker, Member in the School of Historical Studies, who is examining the history and development of race and racism in medieval English literature.

Lia Medeiros, a Member in the School of Natural Sciences, is interested in using astronomical objects and phenomena to test fundamental theories of physics. She recently won a 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, which produced the first image of a supermassive black hole.

“[T]here’s this thing out there that we’re not inventing but discovering. And because of that all you have to do is get somewhere in the neighborhood of the truth. You don’t have to get particularly close to it, you just have to know that it’s there and then you have to not fight it and just let it drag you in toward itself.”