Kristina Guild Douglass wasn’t exactly ready for her close-up when the Mac-Arthur Foundation called out of the blue in October to tell her she had won a prestigious “genius grant.”
“I was literally standing in my kitchen,” Douglass, an associate professor of climate at Columbia University, recalls of the moment she learned she had been named a MacArthur fellow. “I had on pink fluffy slippers that I gave as a gift to a friend of mine, and she thought they were so hideous that she politely declined the gift. So I’ve been wearing them. And I had on dish gloves. I was rinsing blueberry juice and maple syrup off my kids’ breakfast dishes.”
When the caller asked if she was in her office, Douglass replied, “Of course.” She then talked with a MacArthur Foundation committee about what she might do with the $800,000 in grant money that she was about to receive during the next five years.
Not that she had to decide right away. Douglass is one of 22 new MacArthur fellows tapped by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in its international talent search, which has awarded significant, no-strings-attached grants to more than 1,000 creative people since 1981. This year’s ranks include former Geisel School of Medicine professor Jason McLellan, whose pioneering work to genetically sequence a key part of the Covid virus helped lead to multiple vaccines. Douglass was named for her novel approach to archaeology on the ecologically rich island of Madagascar, where she has employed folklore and the memories of elders to better understand more than 1,000 years of human and environmental history.
Douglass, whose parents worked in international aid and development, is accustomed to finding herself in new and unexpected situations. She grew up in several countries—Cameroon, Kenya, Rwanda, Madagascar, and Ukraine. She went to high school at Phillips Academy-Andover in Massachusetts and then came to Dartmouth, where she majored in classical archaeology. The result, according to a former professor, is a worldly person exceptionally open to absorbing new and diverse influences.
“She was used to being plucked out of the places she was familiar with and comfortable with,” says her undergraduate advisor Jeremy Rutter, now professor emeritus of classical studies. “I was sort of blown away when she decided to take a lot of archaeology courses in the classics department. She made no secret that she was interested in a career in Africa,” Rutter says, but she wanted to learn Greek and Roman history as well. “She’s just very curious and willing to explore all kinds of new perspectives.”
Madagascar—an island almost the size of Texas where 90 percent of the plants and animals are found nowhere else—is an extraordinary place to study human adaptation. Humans are relative newcomers, arriving in just the last few thousand years. They encountered a world that included megafauna such as elephant birds that could grow up to 10 feet tall, pygmy hippos, and giant tortoises.
Madagascar also has seen higher levels of climate change than most of the planet, forcing humans and wildlife alike to repeatedly adjust to worsening coastal storms, droughts, and other weather emergencies.
Douglass can recall the moment she became fascinated with Madagascar’s landscape and how the Malagasy people there adapted to survive. As an eighth grader in the country, she took a school-sponsored, 400-mile bike trip in the island’s northeast, with students frequently stopping to talk with locals they met along the way.
Some of my most formative learning at Dartmouth was understanding the power of myths.”
At the time, the conventional story of Madagascar was that the Malagasy had wiped out the big animals and were clearing virgin forest to make way for slash-and-burn agriculture. But the people she met during those three weeks didn’t fit that profile at all. They lived in close connection with their environment and often moved or changed livelihoods in response to changing environmental conditions. “There’s no doubt that trip shaped my professional trajectory and how I see work as an archaeologist being relevant in the present moment,” Douglass says.
She gives major credit to her professors—including James Tatum, Paul Christesen ’88, and Håkan Tell—for shaping her as a scientist. She took six courses from Rutter, including a trip to Greece, even though he was intellectually demanding and she sometimes struggled to keep up with all the reading. “I loved the classes I took with Jerry Rutter even on the days when I felt out of my depth,” she says.
Today, Douglass oversees the Morombe Archaeological Project in southwestern Madagascar, working with a local population that makes a living mainly from fishing, foraging, and shepherding. Her close ties with local people helped her refute a commonly held view that the Malagasy had all but eliminated the local shark population. Locals told her that sharks were never an important part of their diet—they don’t like the taste. Instead, they said it was the arrival of collectors and commercial fishermen around the year 2000 that decimated the shark population. “That decline happened in just a couple of decades, which is a very different scenario than if people had been harvesting shark for several hundred years,” she says.
As a MacArthur fellow, Douglass is poised to expand her research horizons, and she may already have launched a new generation of classics. She and her husband, Scott Douglass ’07, named their sons Percy and Virgil for one of King Arthur’s knights and the Roman poet. “Some of my most formative learning at Dartmouth was understanding the power of myths,” she says, “and how much the stories we tell about our past influence the way we think about the present and the future.”
