Professor Jay Clayton receives Chancellor’s Award for Research
Jay Clayton, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English, was recently celebrated with a Chancellor’s Award for Research for his book Literature, Science, and Public Policy: From Darwin to Genomics, published by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Clayton’s book explores how we don’t make sense of science through facts alone.
Stories shape how we understand its possibilities—and its dangers. Literature, Science, and Public Policy shows how literature can influence public policy concerning scientific controversies in genetics and other areas. Literature brings unique insights to issues involving cloning, GMOs, gene editing, and more by dramatizing their full human complexity. Literature’s value for public policy is demonstrated by striking examples that range from the literary response to evolution in the Victorian era through the modern synthesis of evolution and genetics in the mid-twentieth century to present-day genomics. Outlining practical steps for humanists who want to help shape public policy, this book offers vivid readings of novels by H. G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Aldous Huxley, Robert Heinlein, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gary Shteyngart, and others that illustrate the important insights that literary studies can bring to debates about science and society.
The Chancellor’s Awards for Research recognize excellence in works of research, scholarship or creative expression published or presented in the past three calendar years.