Congratulations to Professor Carole Lee on being selected for the Simpson Center for the Humanities 2022-2023 Society of Scholars. The Society of Scholars is an intellectual community of humanists of diverse generations, academic ranks, and departmental affiliations who contribute to and learn from one another’s work. Each year, approximately eight faculty research fellowships and three dissertation research fellowships support members of the Society of Scholars. The scholars meet biweekly throughout the year to discuss their research in progress.
Lee’s research project is “Theorizing the Bureaucracy Behind Structural Racism in Science.” In it, she discusses how canonical theories of science permit structural racism through tools originally thought to promote democratic science. This project moves beyond valorizing narratives of science to recognize the undertheorized power of administrative, social, and financial pressures driving scientific institutions. The goal of this work is to understand how current institutional configurations facilitated racial inequities in funding and publishing with an eye to identifying changes needed to eliminate structural racism in science's reward systems. Lee has collaborated with the National Institutes of Health and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to study social disparities in their grant review processes.