Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American studies at Princeton University where she specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and social inequity. She is author of four books, including Imagination: A Manifesto (Norton 2024), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want  (Princeton University Press 2022),  winner of the 2023 Stowe Prize,  Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code  (Polity 2019), winner of the 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award for antiracist scholarship and the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life  (Duke University Press 2019).

Professor Benjamin received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine,  and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton; in 2020, the Marguerite Casey Foundation Inaugural Freedom Scholar Award; and in 2024, Ruha was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.