Levitan Prize
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
 

An Annual Research Fund

The $30,000 Levitan Prize was inaugurated in 1990 and is awarded annually as a research fund to support innovative and creative scholarship in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. All regular tenure track SHASS faculty are eligible to apply.

Established through a gift from the late James A. Levitan, a 1945 MIT graduate in chemistry who was also a member of the MIT Corporation.

How to Apply 

Please download the proposal cover form here.

Costs of travel, research assistance, computers, and summer salary are appropriate for inclusion in the budget. Proposals should be no more than 10 double-spaced pages, and should contain a description of the research and its significance as well as a budget indicating how the funds will be spent. Proposals should be submitted to your Administrative Officer.

Inquiries should be directed to levitanprize@mit.edu.

Congratulations to the 2024 recipient: Bettina Stoetzer, Associate Professor of Anthropology:

Unsettling Refuge: Disrupted Mobilities in Multispecies Worlds

Stoetzer’s proposal promises to broaden and deepen the fieldwork underpinning her exciting second book project on multispecies worldmaking. It documents and analyzes how multiple species—from human actors, such as ecologists and planners, to nonhuman actors, such as wild boar, migratory birds, and orca whales—are adapting to climate change and seeking to bring about ecological wellbeing. The work is poised to broaden a growing field responding to challenges of the Anthropocene, the term ported from the sciences to describe human-induced planetary change humanists have shown had key social foundations, particularly in longstanding divisions between human and nonhuman, culture and “nature.” Stoetzer’s multi-sited, transnational ethnography is poised to showcase strategies for co-designing ecosystems at a moment of intensifying change, not only rising temperatures, but in altered biogeochemical cycles that have long structured habitats, migration corridors, and relations between species. 

Recipients of the Levitan Prize 

Looking for the Levitan Awards for Excellence in Teaching? Click here.