Jody Benjamin is a historian of Africa. Since 2015, he has been assistant professor of History at University of California, Riverside. He received his PhD in African & African American Studies (with a concentration in History) from Harvard University in 2016.
Jody Benjamin is a historian of 18th and 19th century Western Africa, where his research focuses on social and cultural history through the lens of of material culture, consumption, and dress. His work in Senegal, Mali and Guinea charts the region’s integration into a global economy dominated by capitalist networks and colonial logics.
Trained as a historian in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard, Dr. Benjamin’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the University of California Regents, University of California Humanities Research Initiative (UCHRI), the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He is the lead project investigator for “Unarchiving Blackness,” a 2022-2023 Mellon Sawyer Seminar on archival practices in African and African