Benjamin D. Weber , Ph.D.

Benjamin D. Weber , Ph.D.

Benjamin Weber

Position Title
Associate Professor

  • African American and African Studies
Bio

Benjamin D. Weber is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American History, Critical Carceral Studies, and Black Social and Political Thought. He has been recognized for his research and teaching, including being named the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Outstanding Teacher of the Year for the United States, receiving an Omni Gold Award for the Calderwood U.S. History Series he hosts on PBS Learning Media, and codirecting Louisiana's contribution to the States of Incarceration national public history project. He is the author of American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2023), a four-hundred-year reckoning with the colonial workings of the carceral state and movements seeking to broaden the meaning and experience of freedom.

Benjamin's research, writing, and public engagement work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), Harvard University's W.E.B. DuBois Institute & Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard's Charles Warren Center for American History, Brown University's Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, and the Marcus Garvey Memorial Foundation. He has worked as a Senior Associate for the Vera Institute of Justice in New Orleans on initiatives to end money bail, as a Policy Associate at Alternate ROOTS, a grassroots art-activism organization in the South, and as a public High School Teacher in Los Angeles.

Teaching Interests: African American History; Black Social and Political Thought; Policing and Prisons; Social Movements; Black Radical Tradition; Black Internationalism; Global Black Power; Abolitionism; Racial Capitalism; Colonialism and Decolonization; Black Geographies; Community Archives; Film & Digital Media.

Research Interests: African American History; African Diaspora Studies; Critical Carceral Studies; Racial Capitalism; Colonialism and Decolonization; Black Radical Tradition; Abolitionism; Black Internationalism; Black Geographies; Archives; Public Memory; Law and Society; Critical Theory.

Education and Degree(s)
  • PhD in History, Harvard University
  • MA in History, Harvard University
  • MAT in Social Studies Education, Brown University
  • BA with Highest Honors in History, Oberlin College