Princeton Professor Ruha Benjamin awarded MacArthur ‘genius’ grant
Ruha Benjamin, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, has been awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship for “illuminating how technology reflects and reproduces social inequality and championing the role of imagination in social transformation.”
“By integrating critical analysis of innovation with attentiveness to the potential for positive change, Benjamin demonstrates the importance of imagination and grassroots activism in shaping social policies and cultural practices,” the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation said in its announcement.
Benjamin is one of 22 MacArthur Fellows in the 2024 cohort, a group of scientists, artists, scholars, and activists who will each receive an $800,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation over a five-year period. The prestigious fellowships, known informally as “genius grants,” recognize individuals who have demonstrated “exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits.”
“Ruha Benjamin’s innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship has brought critical new perspectives to our understanding of racial and social inequities in technology, science, and medicine,” said Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber. “Professor Benjamin is a strikingly original and creative thinker, writer, and educator who inspires her students and readers.”
In her scholarship, Benjamin studies the social dimensions of science, medicine and technology. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2014 and is currently on sabbatical.
She is a 2017 recipient of the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) from 2016 to 2017.
Her research has been published in journals such as Science, the American Journal of Law & Medicine, and Science, Technology, & Human Values. Benjamin was among the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Fund’s inaugural cohort of Freedom Scholars in 2020.
She is also an award-winning author and popular speaker who has delivered talks on both the TED and TEDx stages and has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and The Guardian, among other publications.
Her most recent book, “Imagination: A Manifesto” (Norton, 2024), showcases artists, educators and activists in a narrative that she has called “a proclamation of the power of the imagination.” Her acclaimed 2022 book, “Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want” (Princeton University Press) won the 2023 Stowe Prize for Literary Activism, which recognizes “a distinguished book of general adult fiction or nonfiction whose written work illuminates a critical social justice issue in the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”
Benjamin is also the author of "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019) and "People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier" (Stanford University Press, 2013). She is the editor of “Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life” (Duke University Press, 2019).
Benjamin received her B.A. in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California-Berkeley.
She completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society. She was an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University before joining Princeton.
In addition to her tenure at IAS, she has received fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
“MacArthur Fellows are nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee,” according to the foundation’s announcement of 2024 fellows.