ABOUT DR. JODY BENJAMIN

Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Riverside

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 Diaspora Studies.

He is also a 2022 co-Convenor of the Humanities Across Borders “Textiles and Dyes as Transnational, Global Knowledge,” an international graduate school at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Dr. Benjamin has published chapters in two edited volumes, Dressing Global Bodies: the Political Power of Dress in World History (Routledge, 2019) and in Creating African Fashion Histories: Politics, Museums and Sartorial Practices (Indiana University Press, 2022). His research monograph, The Texture of Change: Dress, Pluralism and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850, is under contract with Ohio University Press New African History Series. He is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches classes on Africa and African Diasporas.