The 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.

Awarded for "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.