Glenn Davis Stone, of Washington University in St. Louis, has been selected for a prestigious fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
A professor of anthropology and of environmental studies, both in Arts & Sciences, and a faculty member since 1995, Stone is among 178 Guggenheim Fellows chosen in 2016 from an applicant pool of nearly 3,000 scholars, artists and scientists in the United States and Canada. The Guggenheim Fellowship is awarded on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
Stone’s primary areas of research are food and agriculture, including the cultural, political, economic and ecological aspects of both small-holder and industrial agriculture.
He will use his Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a new book titled “Modified: How GE Crops Have Changed the World.” The project will offer a big-picture view of how evolving genetic technologies have pushed world agriculture toward a critical crossroads — a key moment where serious questions about the current system will need to be addressed.
Stone’s major research projects have been in Nigeria, where he worked on social organization of sustainable farming and land conflict; India, where he studied the spread of genetically modified cotton and impacts on indigenous knowledge; and the Philippines, where he explored the political economy of heirloom, Green Revolution, and Golden Rice.
Earlier in his career, he worked on agriculture in the prehistoric Southwestern United States, and, in recent years, he begun research on the contemporary alternative (“sustainable”) farming scene.
He also writes the blog “Field questions: The rest of the story on food, farming and biotechnology.”
Stone is the author of the book “Settlement Ecology” and has written more than 45 articles in such journals as Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Agriculture & Human Values, Human Organization, Food Culture & Society and World Development.
He has received the Gordon Willey Prize from the Society for American Archaeology; fellowships by the School of Advanced Research and the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the Morley Science Medal from Western Reserve Academy. He is past president of the Anthropology & Environment Society.
Stone’s Guggenheim Fellowship is the third awarded to Washington University anthropology faculty in the last five years. John Bowen, the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences, received the fellowship in 2012; and Pascal Boyer, the Henry Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory, was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011.
Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $334 million in fellowships to over 18,000 individuals. For more information, visit the foundation’s website.
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