Four Graduate School alumni awarded 2024 Wilbur Cross Medals
2024 Yale Graduate School Wilbur Cross Medalists (L to R): James Scott (’67 PhD, Political Science), Anne Ferguson-Smith (’86 PhD, Biology), John Guillory (’79 PhD, English Language and Literature), and Kai Li (’86 PhD, Computer Science)
Four alumni of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) will be honored with Wilbur Cross Medals in recognition of their exceptional scholarship, teaching, and public service. The awards are the highest honor the school bestows on alumni.
One of the medals, to longtime Yale professor James Scott (’67 PhD, Political Science), is being awarded posthumously. Scott, a pioneering social scientist who founded and was director of Yale’s Program in Agrarian Studies, died on July 19 but had learned before his death that he was being honored.
The other medal recipients are Anne Ferguson-Smith (’86 PhD, Biology) a renowned geneticist and the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge; John Guillory (’79 PhD, English Language and Literature) a scholar of Renaissance literature and the Julius Silver Professor of English Emeritus at New York University; and Kai Li (’86 PhD, Computer Science) a groundbreaking computer scientist and the Paul M. Wythes ’55, P’86 and Marcia R. Wythes P’86 Professor at Princeton University.
Ferguson-Smith, Guillory, and Li will return to Yale for a series of campus events and to deliver public lectures. Nancy Lee Peluso, a professor in the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School in Society & Environment, and Ian Shapiro (’83 PhD, Political Science; ’87 JD), Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale, will deliver a lecture in honor of James Scott, whose life and contributions also will be celebrated at a gathering on October 7, 11 am-2:30 pm at the Yale Farm, 345 Edwards St. All are welcome; register at https://tinyurl.com/gatheringforjimscott.
The Wilbur Cross Medals celebrate the legacy of service and achievements of Wilbur Lucius Cross (1889 PhD, English Literature), who served as dean of the Graduate School from 1916 to 1930 and was Connecticut’s governor from 1930 to 1939. Awarded annually by the GSAS Alumni Association, the medals are presented for exceptional scholarship, public service, teaching, or academic administration.
Short profiles of this year’s honorees follow, as well as the titles, times and locations of their lectures, which are free and open to the public.
Anne Ferguson-Smith is a developmental geneticist, genome biologist, and epigeneticist who is a world expert on mammalian development and genetic imprinting. She leads a research group of experimental and computational scientists whose work focuses on the epigenetic control of genome function, particularly the implications of epigenetic inheritance for health and disease. She also investigates how genetic and environmental factors influence development and health within and across generations.
At the University of Cambridge, Ferguson-Smith has served as pro-vice-chancellor for research and international partnerships and as head of the Department of Genetics. She has been president of the UK Genetics Society since 2021, and in the same year was named executive chair of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Her biomedical contributions have been recognized with election as a fellow of the Royal Society, from which she received the Buchanan Medal in 2021. In 2023 she was named Commander of the British Empire.
Ferguson-Smith’s lecture, “Epigenetic Inheritance - Models and Mechanisms,” will take place on October 7 at 4 pm in the O.C. Marsh Lecture Hall of the Yale Science Building, 260 Whitney Ave.
John Guillory has focused his work on Renaissance literature, the history of literary study, the history of rhetoric, and the early history of media studies, especially the work of I.A. Richards, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong. He is the author of Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, and the upcoming On Close Reading, which will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press, among other works. In addition, he has written numerous essays exploring issues of literary study and criticism, general education, and rhetoric, as well as such literary figures as Milton, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, and others. He is currently at work on a book entitled Freedom of Thought: Philosophy and Literature in the English Renaissance.
Guillory’s honors include the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Francis Andrew March Award of the Association of Departments of English for Distinguished Service to the Profession of English Studies, and the Golden Dozen Teaching Award at New York University.
Guillory will speak on the topic “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know: On the Concept of Social Capital” on October 7 at 3:30 pm in Room L02 of the Humanities Quadrangle, 320 York St.
Kai Li has made significant contributions in several areas of computer systems.
His dissertation pioneered a shared virtual memory system that allowed users to store shared data across a network of computers without physically shared memory. He also led the development of a user-level communication mechanism for such environments, a key idea that became the foundation to the industry standard Infiniband that is now deployed in most hyperscale data centers.
Li also led the development of data deduplication and cofounded Data Domain Inc., which revolutionized storage systems for efficient backup and disaster recovery. He was the co-principal investigator of ImageNet, which propelled deep learning to the forefront of machine learning and sparked what many call the “deep learning revolution.”
Li, who grew up in Chanchun, China, was one of the first group of students to come to the US from China for PhD studies after the Cultural Revolution. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Li will lecture on “The Transformative Power of Education: From Factory Floors in China to Academic and Entrepreneurial Success in the U.S." on October 7 at 3:30 pm in Rosenfeld Hall, 109 Grove Street.
James Scott was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science and professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale, and held an appointment in environmental studies. He was a member of the faculty from 1976 until his retirement in 2021. Scott’s scholarship spanned multiple disciplines and subjects, focusing on such topics as peasant resistance, top-down state social planning, anarchism, state violence, and Southeast Asia studies. His 10 books include The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Seeing Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed, Two Cheers for Anarchism, Against the Grain, and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. His final book, In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life it Brings, will be published by Yale University Press in 2025.
Scott conducted fieldwork in Malaysia, Burma, Africa, and elsewhere. Toward the end of his life, he was especially interested in the revolution in Burma. He was founder of the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship. The interdisciplinary Program in Agrarian Studies, which he founded at Yale in 1991, has been emulated by institutions around the world.
“James C. Scott: In a Field of His Own,” is the title of the lecture that will be delivered by Peluso and Shapiro on October 7 at 4 pm in the auditorium of Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Ave.
Peluso teaches in the Department of Environmental Studies, Policy and Management at Berkeley and is an affiliate professor in the school’s geography and anthropology departments. She has conducted research in Java and Kalimantan, Indonesia, for over 40 years. She co-edited the books The Social Lives of Land, New Frontiers of Land Control, Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, People and Nature in a Neoliberal Age, Violent Environments, and Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation, and Development. Her first book, Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance, will be updated in Indonesian in 2025. Peluso is vice president of the Association of Asian Scholars and will serve as the organization’s president in 2025-2026.
Shapiro has written widely on democracy, justice, and the methods of social inquiry. His most recent books are Politics Against Domination, Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself (with Frances Rosenbluth), The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It (with Michael Graetz), and Uncommon Sense. His current research concerns the relations between democracy and the distribution of income, wealth, and risk. He served as the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies 2004-2019.
Written by Susan González