Ruha Benjamin is professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. She specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science and medicine, race and technology, knowledge and power. She is author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford 2013), Race After Technology (Polity 2019), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life  (Duke 2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

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.

PUBLICATIONS

2013. Benjamin, R. People’s Science: Reconstituting Bodies & Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press).

2012. Benjamin, R. Genetics and Global Public Health: Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia, Simon Dyson and Karl Atkin (eds), Ch11, Organized Ambivalence: When Stem Cell Research & Sickle Cell Disease Converge. New York: Routledge.

2011. Benjamin, R. Organized Ambivalence: When Stem Cell Research & Sickle Cell Disease Converge. Ethnicity & Health, Vol. 16, Issue 4-5: 447-463.

2009. Benjamin, R. A Lab of Their Own: Genomic Sovereignty as Postcolonial Science Policy. Policy & Society Vol. 28, Issue 4: 3