Expertise

History of Racial Capitalism, Carceral Studies, U.S. Urban History, U.S. Cultural History, Social Movements 

Biography

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. 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, 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 Repairas well as the journal Tikkun. Their research has been supported by 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).

Curriculum Vitae | Website

Selected Publications

Selected Scholarly Publications

• “Abolition Infrastructures: A Conversation with Rachel Herzing and Dean Spade,” Radical History Review on the “Political Lives of Infrastructure” (October 2023)
• “Born in Flames: Arson, Racial Capitalism, and the Reinsuring of the Bronx in the Late Twentieth Century,” Enterprise & Society(December 2022)
• "The Crisis of Insurance and the Insuring of the Crisis: Riot Reinsurance and Redlining in the Aftermath of the 1960s Uprisings," Journal of American History (2021)
• “The Broken Windows of the Bronx: Putting the Theory in Its Place,” American Quarterly(2020)
• "Unsettling 'Inner City': Liberal Protestantism and the Postwar Origins of a Keyword in Urban Studies," Antipode (2018)
• "Still Submerged: The Uninhabitability of Urban Redevelopment," in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015)

Selected Public Scholarship

• “A Theater of State Panic,” New York Review of Books (September 2022)
• “Edifice Complex,” Jewish Currents (January 2023)
• “How a 50-Year-Old Study Was Misconstrued to Create Destructive Broken-Windows Policing,” Washington Post (2019)
• “Philly Stands Up: A Portrait of Praxis, An Anatomy of Accountability,” in Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, ed. Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (AK Press, 2019) (Co-authored with Esteban Lance Kelly, et al.)
• "How We Learned Not to Succeed in Transformative Justice," Make/Shift Magazine: Feminisms in Motion (2012) [reprinted in Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan, Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators (AK Press, 2019)]
• “Confronting Sexual Assault: Transformative Justice on the Ground in Philadelphia,” Tikkun (2012)

Courses Taught

• History of the US City in Nine Uprisings
• History of the Carceral State
• Philadelphia Arts and Culture
• Readings in Racial Capitalism