Rich Benjamin
Rich Benjamin is a cultural anthropologist who researches contemporary U.S. politics and culture, specializing in democracy, social relations, space and place, demographics and race. He is also a sought-after lecturer, and a public-facing scholar often interviewed in the national and international media. His essays appear regularly in public discourse, including in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Benjamin is completing a family memoir that doubles as a portrait of post-Cold War America, to be published by Pantheon Books. He is currently the Walter Jackson Bate Fellow in Nonfiction Literature at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.
Benjamin’s first book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, won an Editor’s Choice Award from the American Library Association. Now in its second printing, this groundbreaking anthropological study is one of few to have illuminated in advance the rise of white anxiety and “Trumpism” in contemporary U.S. life. Benjamin’s past and ongoing research have received support from Civitella, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, Princeton University, the Russell Sage Foundation, Columbia University School of Law, the Bellagio Center, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Benjamin earned a BA from Wesleyan University and a doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University.