ABOUT

Bench Ansfield is a historian of racial capitalism, the carceral state, and twentieth-century U.S. cities. They hold a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University, and they are currently an Assistant Professor of History at Temple University. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, they were an ACLS and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and an American Democracy Fellow at Harvard's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.

Their book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. It examines the wave of arson-for-profit that coursed through the Bronx and scores of other U.S. cities in the 1970s. The dissertation upon which it is based was awarded the 2022 Allan Nevins Prize for best dissertation in American History by the Society of American Historians (SAH). It also won the McNeil Center’s Zuckerman Prize in American Studies, the Business History Conference’s Herman E. Krooss Prize for best dissertation in Business History, and Yale’s Theron Rockwell Field Prize, awarded to one dissertation across the university. Selections of the project have been published in the Journal of American History and American Quarterly, winning the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Louis Pelzer Award for the best essay in American history by a graduate student and the Urban History Association’s (UHA) Arnold Hirsch Award for best article in a scholarly journal, respectively. Their peer-edited articles have also appeared in Antipode and in the collection, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke 2015), edited by Katherine McKittrick.

Bench worked as a researcher on the PBS-aired documentary Decade of Fire (2019), and they curated a digital exhibition with the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. They’ve also written for the New York Review of Books, Jewish Currents, and the Washington Post’s Made by History series, along with other popular publications. They are a longtime member of the veteran transformative justice organization Philly Stands Up, and their writing on that work can be found in Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan’s volume, Fumbling Towards Repair as well as the journal Tikkun. Their research has been supported by an ACLS Fellowship, a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Jefferson Scholars National Fellowship, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).