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Shailaja Paik named 2024 MacArthur Fellow
The ‘Genius Grant’ was awarded to Paik to advance her research on Dalits in India.
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Shailaja Paik. / Photo/Joseph Fuqua II/UC Marketing + Brand.
Shailaja Paik, a professor at the University of Cincinnati, has been awarded the MacArthur fellowship, commonly known as the “Genius Grant.”
The fellowship includes an $800,000 grant, awarded over five years, to support Paik’s research on caste, gender, and sexuality in India, which focuses on Dalit women, also known as “untouchables,” the lowest stratum in India’s caste system.
Paik’s research sheds light on the intersection of caste oppression and gender discrimination, exploring how Dalit women navigate these oppressive structures. She has written extensively on the subject, including her books ‘Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination’ and ‘The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India’.
Paik utilizes archival and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the persistence of caste-based oppression, particularly through the lives of Dalit women performers in Maharashtra.
“I am deeply honored by this recognition,” Paik said, reflecting on the MacArthur Fellowship. “This fellowship is a celebration of the enormous contributions of Dalits — their ideas, actions, history and fight for human rights. It is a fantastic reminder of the contributions Dalit studies as well as me, a Dalit woman scholar, have made to the different fields of knowledge.”
Paik is the first-ever University of Cincinnati (UC) professor to receive this fellowship. UC president Neville G. Pinto praised Paik’s work, saying, “We are so thrilled that Dr. Paik has been recognized for her remarkable scholarship working with a population of people who have been overlooked and discriminated against for centuries..”
“Paik, a Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History and affiliate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Asian Studies and sociology in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences, is also one of 10 MacArthur Fellows to be named in Ohio and the first ever in both the city of Cincinnati and the University of Cincinnati since the award began in 1981,” a university statement remarked.
The MacArthur Fellowship recognizes individuals who have shown extraordinary creativity and a track record of significant achievement, with the potential for future contributions in their fields.
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