UofL presents the annual prizes in music, world order, psychology, education and religion and gives the religion prize jointly with the seminary. All of the 2024 winners will visit Louisville in April to give free, public talks on their winning ideas.

The winners are:

• Aleksandra Vrebalov, a Serbian-American composer who won the music prize for a chorale work transcending a single language, culture or religion to express how all life is interconnected
• Neta Crawford, a University of Oxford international relations scholar who won the world order prize for analyzing the Pentagon’s carbon footprint and its effect on climate change
• Ann Masten, a University of Minnesota child development scholar who won the psychology prize for finding that resilience comes from “ordinary magic” within us and our supportive connections with others
• Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen, two University of California sociologists who co-won the education prize for exploring the racial consequences of funding cuts at public universities
• The Rev. Charles Halton, an Episcopal priest in Lexington, Ky., who explained how embracing God as a being with human qualities can inspire us to become better people

“The Grawemeyer Awards recognize highly constructive ideas with world-changing potential and that’s certainly true of the ideas we’re honoring this time.” said Marion Hambrick, the awards program’s executive director.

Vrebalov shows how music can unite us despite our differences, while Crawford sheds new light on the U.S. military’s role in climate change. Masten explains why some people recover quickly from major setbacks when others don’t. Hamilton and Nielsen call for a fairer way to fund the nation’s public universities and Halton offers a fresh perspective on spiritual growth.

UofL graduate Charles Grawemeyer created the Grawemeyer Awards in 1984 with an initial endowment of $9 million. The first award, music composition, was presented in 1985. ����ֱ�� was added in 1989, religion in 1990, world order in 1998 and psychology in 2000.

Grawemeyer distinguished the awards by honoring ideas rather than lifelong achievement, also insisting that laypeople as well as professionals take part in the selection process.

Theologians often dismiss those depictions of God in the Bible because they seem to clash with God’s image as an all-loving being, but an Episcopal priest with a different view has received the 2024 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for helping explain the paradox.

The Rev. Charles Halton, associate rector of Christ Church Cathedral in Lexington, Ky., won the prize for ideas set forth in his 2021 “A Human-Shaped God: Theology of an Embodied God.” He argues that embracing God as a deity with human qualities can bring us closer to God and inspire us to become better people.

“We are, like God, to move from a place of exclusion and anger-fueled violence to a life of inclusion, radical forgiveness and compassion,” he said. “This is the path God is on. If we are not on it too, we are not imitating God.”

As an example, Halton cites the Old Testament story of how God floods Earth, destroying everything except Noah’s Ark. Later, God feels regret and creates a rainbow in the sky.

“Many Bible accounts are springboards for theological imagination that help us see God in constructive ways,” he said. “As humans, we too lash out in anger, but we also learn to forgive.”

explores “an underappreciated view of God that exists in the Bible but is absent from most Eurocentric theology,” said Tyler Mayfield, who directs the religion award. “His approach is original, thought-provoking and offers new opportunities for understanding the biblical God.”

Halton taught Old Testament and Semitic languages at seminary and college levels for nearly a decade. He holds a doctorate from Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Bible and ancient Near East studies and is an external affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London.

The University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary jointly give the religion prize.

Recipients of next year’s were named this week pending formal approval by trustees at both institutions. The $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in music, world order, psychology and education. Winners will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

Two University of California sociologists exploring that question are cowinners of the 2024 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in ����ֱ�� for their ideas in “Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities.” University of Chicago Press published the in 2021.

In the work, and argue that decades of cuts in public funding for public universities have eroded schools’ abilities to deliver a quality education to racially and economically marginalized students.

For years, public universities operated mainly with government funds, which have been tapering off since the 1980s.  Most schools have had to trim costs and raise tuition. Many have turned to philanthropy, investments and other sources of private income to stay afloat, a trend that has penalized schools with the highest number of marginalized students, Hamilton and Nielsen found.

“Public universities have faced decades of austerity and were hit hard by COVID-19, but those primarily serving marginalized students are being literally starved for resources,” Hamilton said.

In a study focusing on UC’s system of nine schools, Hamilton and Nielsen found the two campuses with the highest number of such students, Merced and Riverside, received fewer system resources. Some underfunded universities struggle to provide basic services to students, who may wait a month or more for mental health appointments and compete with hundreds of their peers to schedule sessions with academic advisers.

“This pattern is not just restricted to the UC system,” Hamilton said. “University wealth is nationally concentrated at schools that serve very few marginalized students.”

Hamilton and Nielsen make a compelling case for rethinking the way we fund public universities, said education award director Jeff Valentine. “Their work raises important ethical and philosophical questions about what higher education is, what it should be and how a more equitable funding method can benefit everyone in our society.”

Recipients of next year’s are being named this week pending formal trustee approval. The annual, $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in music, world order, psychology and religion. Winners will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

Ann Masten, a professor in the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, earned the prize for showing that our capacity to overcome potentially harmful experiences comes from ordinary but powerful adaptive processes inside us and from our supportive connections with others.

Resilience science began around 1970 as a search to explain how some children who face severe adversity seem to thrive while others do not.

“As I studied children and families dealing with war, disasters, poverty, violence and homelessness, I found a consistent set of surprisingly ordinary but powerful factors at work,” she said. “Resilience didn’t depend on special qualities but on a capacity to adapt that we develop over time as we are nurtured, learn and gain experience.”

Supportive relationships, a sense of belonging, self-control, problem-solving skills, optimism, motivation and a sense of purpose all play a part in creating the “ordinary magic” that makes us resilient, she found.

“Her work is inspiring because it reveals that the human capacity to overcome adversity does not rely on rare ingredients,” said Nicholaus Noles, psychology award director. “The seeds of resilience, of success, are within all of us, and we need only time and the right kind of relationships and experiences to overcome the obstacles we face.”

Masten’s findings have shaped policy and practice in many fields outside psychology such as pediatrics, school counseling, social work and disaster response. People in more than 180 countries including Ukraine have taken part in her online course about the resilience of children in war and disaster.

A licensed psychologist in Minnesota since 1986, holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Minnesota and a bachelor’s degree from Smith College. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021 and has received mentoring and lifetime contribution awards from the American Psychological Association.

Recipients of next year’s are being named this week pending formal trustee approval. The annual, $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in music, world order, education and religion. Winners will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

Neta Crawford, an international relations professor at the University of Oxford in England, received the prize for the ideas in her “The Pentagon, Climate Change and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of Military Emissions” published by MIT Press in 2022.

The U.S. military is the world’s largest single institutional producer of greenhouse gases, Crawford found. Between 1975 and 2022, its emissions averaged 81 million metric tons of greenhouse hydrocarbons a year—more than most countries. After it reduced operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, its emissions dropped to an annual average of 51 million metric tons, a level that still poses more risk to human existence than most military conflicts, she found.

“The Pentagon looks at the world in terms of threats but doesn’t see its own emissions as part of the problem,” she said. “If it’s going to successfully switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy, it must stop defending oil-rich countries and develop a different approach to national security.”

is the first scholar to thoroughly assess the U.S. military’s global emissions profile and weigh its implications, said Charles Ziegler, who directs the world order award.

“She convincingly explains how the military’s dependence on fossil fuels and consequent need to defend the sources of those fuels leads to a cycle of demand, consumption, militarization and conflict,” Ziegler said. “She also explains how the Pentagon can do more to make life on our planet sustainable.”

Crawford, Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford since 2021, also codirects the Costs of War Project, a non-partisan effort at Brown University assessing the human and financial costs of U.S. wars. She was inducted into the British Academy and American Academy of Arts and Sciences earlier this year and won an International Studies Association distinguished scholar award in 2018.

Recipients of next year’s are being named this week pending formal trustee approval. The annual, $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in music, psychology, education and religion. Winners will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

Kronos Quartet, a group long known for nurturing musical innovation, and San Francisco Girls’ Chorus, a Bay Area group for young women from diverse backgrounds, premiered the 22-minute work in 2018 in San Francisco with Valerie Sainte-Agathe conducting. The piece also incorporates bells, Tibetan bowls and musical saw.

“�Ę’ is unrelated to any religion because the creative force driving all life does not care about culture, language or religion,” Vrebalov said. “The words are made up and have no meaning. The piece goes beyond verbal narrative to show how all life on our planet is interconnected.”

The work’s Latin title translates to “Mass Above Words” in English.

“Vrebalov’s music transports and envelops the listener,” said Matthew Ertz, music award director. “Her winning piece emphasizes the universality of human expression through music, bypassing a single language, style or tradition. She blends together diverse harmonies, rhythms, styles and improvisations, conveying her devotion to music and to the uniqueness of all things.”

, 53, who lives in New York City, moved to the United States in 1995 and became a U.S. citizen in 2015. She has composed more than 90 works, including orchestral, chamber, opera and experimental pieces. She often starts by drawing and painting colorful images reflecting her ideas before converting the images into musical notation.

Ensembles worldwide have performed her compositions. Kronos Quartet alone has premiered 15 since 1997, and more than 25 other organizations such as Carnegie Hall and the English National Ballet have commissioned her work. Composers Edition in the United Kingdom distributes her self-published scores.

Vrebalov taught music at Serbia’s Novi Sad University and City University of New York and has been a resident or visiting artist on three continents. The Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Golden Emblem from the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs are among her honors.

Recipients of next year’s are being named this week pending formal trustee approval. The annual $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in world order, psychology, education and religion. Recipients will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

Hearing her son ask those questions and seeing Black Lives Matter protests erupt nationwide after George Floyd’s death led theologian Kelly Brown Douglas to write “Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter.”

On Dec. 9, she was named winner of the 2023 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for the book’s ideas.

, dean of Union Theological Seminary’s Episcopal Divinity School in New York City and a canon theologian at Washington Cathedral, is one of the first Black female Episcopal priests in the United States and the first Black person to head an Episcopal Church-affiliated educational institution.

In “,” she shows how a “white way of knowing” came to dominate America through an anti-Black narrative tracing back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. She also cites examples of how the bias persists today, from the refusal to dismantle Confederate monuments to attempts to discredit The 1619 Project, an effort to reframe U.S. history starting from the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia.

While recognizing the prolonged suffering of Black people raises deep questions about the credibility of Christianity, she argues that faith, not despair, is the best hope for assuring Black lives are valued in the future.

“Douglas takes us on a captivating, painful journey with personal and erudite reflections on America’s corrupted soul,” said Tyler Mayfield, religion award director. “Her insights are lucid and disturbing. Her remedies are bold and constructive. May we find the courage to walk into the future she envisions for us all.”

Douglas, who has doctor of philosophy and master of divinity degrees, has been a faculty member at Edward Waters College, Howard University and Goucher College. She has written five books, including “Sexuality and the Black Church” in which she addresses homophobia from a womanist perspective. Orbis Books published her Grawemeyer Award-winning book in 2021.

The University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary jointly give the religion prize. Recipients of next year’s s were named Dec. 5-9 pending formal approval by trustees at both institutions.

The $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in music, world order, psychology and education. Winners will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

Jennifer Morton, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, earned the prize for her ideas in “Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility.” Princeton University Press published the in 2019.

The dream of achieving success by attending college is deeply flawed for some, says Morton, a first-generation college student who left Peru to attend Princeton. Drawing on her own experience, philosophical and social science research and interviews with first-generation, low-income and immigrant students, she found that the college experience often forces students to turn away from family and friends to achieve academic success.

For example, one student caring for an ill sister told Morton she had missed so many classes and assignment due dates she wasn’t sure she could catch up. Another student said he had cut ties with his community to be able to manage college.

“First-generation students are often putting their relationships with friends, family and their communities on the line,” Morton said. “We need to recognize their sacrifices and focus on the social, emotional and ethical aspects of their college experience, not simply on grade-point averages and graduation rates.”

, who also is a senior fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Ethics and ����ֱ��, has worked at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, City College of New York and Swarthmore College. She has a doctor of philosophy degree from Stanford University and has received several awards, including the American Philosophical Association’s Scheffler Prize.

“By focusing on the dilemmas first-generation and low-income students can face when pursuing a degree, Morton shed light on an important but often neglected issue,” said Jeff Valentine, education award director. “She also offers strategies that colleges, faculty and students themselves can use to navigate these challenges.”

Recipients of next year’s are being named Dec. 5-9 pending formal approval by trustees. The annual, $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in music, world order, psychology and religion. Winners will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

Maybe not, according to David Dunning and Justin Kruger, two social psychologists who today were named cowinners of the 2023 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for identifying a cognitive bias that causes people to overrate their own competence.

Their idea “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” also known as the , shows that people tend to have overly flattering opinions of their ability to perform tasks compared to what objective evidence shows.

“Ironically, people who are the least skilled are often the most confident because they can’t judge their own skills accurately, and those who are the most skilled often fail to see how much their skill surpasses others,” they said.

For example, in a recent study of whether vaccines and autism are linked, participants who knew the least about autism were most likely to claim they knew as much as doctors and scientists. Studies with gun owners, emergency responders, chess players, budget officials, debate teams and wine tasters have produced similar results.

Dunning and Kruger first described the effect in a 1999 paper inspired by a news story about a bank robber who spread lemon juice over his face thinking it would make him invisible to security cameras. Since then, their finding has been cited in more than 8,500 scholarly publications and mentioned regularly in popular media discussions of issues ranging from national politics to education policy.

“The Dunning-Kruger effect has always been an important finding, but the idea is likely to have even more impact in the years ahead as information and misinformation become more available to us and our society struggles with when and how to trust experts in a variety of domains,” said Nicholaus Noles, psychology award director.

, a University of Michigan psychology professor who previously worked at Cornell University, has a doctorate from Stanford University. , a senior research scholar at New York University’s Stern School of Business who previously worked at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has a doctorate from Cornell.

Recipients of next year’s are being named this week pending formal approval by trustees. The annual, $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in music, world order, education and religion. Winners will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, earned the prize for ideas set forth in his , “The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology is Reshaping Power, Politics and Resistance” published by Oxford University Press in 2021.

Feldstein examined how governments in China, Thailand, Ethiopia and the Philippines have used a wide range of digital tools such as internet shutdowns, disinformation campaigns, artificial intelligence and even DNA collection to repress their citizens. For example, authorities in Hong Kong used facial recognition to identify protest leaders and censorship tools to keep protest information from circulating.

“My goal was to learn how digital technology will affect the way governments rule in the future,” he said. “I found that as people come to rely more on online communication, their leaders are realizing they can use the same tools—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok—to spread propaganda, sow division and intimidate their critics.”

His findings have disturbing implications for democracies and civil society organizations worldwide, said Rodger Payne, who directs the world order award.

“Through skillful, thorough research and analysis, Feldstein shows how democracies are backsliding and authoritarian governments are becoming revitalized by the use of digital technology,” Payne said. “He also shares creative ideas for democracies, civil society organizations and businesses to mitigate that trend.”

, who works in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict and Government Program, was a U.S. Department of State deputy assistant secretary in the Obama administration. A former associate professor at Boise State University, he also was policy director at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He has a law degree from University of California-Berkeley and a bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University.

Recipients of next year’s are being named this week pending formal approval by trustees. The annual, $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in music, psychology, education and religion. Winners will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.