Igniting Inspiration

UofL, seminary name 2025 Grawemeyer Award winners

Congratulations to the five (5) 2025 Grawemeyer Award winners.

• Music Composition – Christian Mason, a London-based composer for creating a work that changes how music is usually experienced by employing a spatially shifting ensemble of 12 musicians and encouraging its audience to roam the performance space.
• World Order – John M. Owen IV, a University of Virginia Politics Professor for researching and writing The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order, an innovative book about the way the international ecosystem constrains and influences democracies.
• Education – Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts Boston Professor, for researching and writing Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline, a book that describes and analyzes the building of the grassroots movement to end racially disproportionate school discipline policy and policing practices in schools across the US.
• Religion – Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, Georgetown University Professor of Jewish Studies, reconsidering the relationship between disability and spirituality. Loving Our Own Bones, won a National Jewish Book Award.
• Psychology – James Gross, Stanford University Psychology Professor, the Ernest R. Hilgard Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, theorized that managing one’s feelings before they are fully formed offers a healthier approach than trying to manage them after they’re in full swing.

The Grawemeyer Awards recognize highly constructive ideas with world changing potential and that’s certainly true of the ideas that will be honored on Thursday, April 10. During the week of April 7, the award recipients will give a public presentation.

The University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary announced the five recipients the week of December 2. The recipients will receive $100,000 monetary award.