Presenters
Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School and in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. He is also a MacArthur Fellow. His research, which focuses on race, punishment, and social welfare policy is published in journals across the social sciences. In 2021, Miller published his first sole authored book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, which won a number of awards, including the 2023 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology, the 2022 Herbert Jacob Book Prize from the Law and Society Association and two PROSE Awards from the Association of American Publisher’s, including the award for Excellence in Social Science. Halfway Home was also a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize for Current Affairs and the Pen America John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction. In 2022, the John. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation selected Miller to be a MacArthur Fellow, the so called “genius grant.” In the award citation, the prize committee noted that “Miller is modeling a way to write about his subjects that refuses to reduce them to their hardships, and he is illuminating how the American carceral system reshapes individuals’ lives and relationships long after their time has been served.” He is currently conducting a transnational study of black emancipation in port cities along the transatlantic slave trade route and a study of violence and our responses to it across the globe.
Abstract title: The Least of These: From Fear and Exclusion to Radical Hospitality in the Making of a New World
