Laurence Ralph

Ralph received his Bachelor of Science degree in history, Technology and Society from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004. He then earned his M.A. and PhD in anthropology from The University of Chicago in 2006 and 2010 respectively.

Ralph began his academic career at the University of Michigan in 2010, where he was a Visiting Faculty member and a Mandela-Rodney-Dubois Postdoctoral fellow at the Center for African and Afro American Studies.[11] He was an assistant professor in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University from 2011 to 2015, after which he became the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences till 2017[5] and subsequently became the Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies there. Since 2018, he has been the Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.[12]

Since 2015, he has been the Director at the Center of Transnational Policing and since 2017, he has been on the Advisory Council of the Wenner Gren Foundation.[13]

Ralph's work focuses on the way police abuse, mass incarceration and the drug trade have historically normalized disease, disability and the premature death of black urbanites as they are often perceived as being expendable. The research he does lies at the junction of critical medical and political anthropology, African-American studies and the emerging scholarship on disability and he combined the literature on these to show for black urban residents, violence and injury plays a central role in their day-to-day lives. He has explored these themes in Disability Studies Quarterly, Transition, Anthropological Theory, and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

In an article, Ralph examines the life and career of a Chicago police detective, Richard Zuley, who tortured criminal suspects in the United States and Guantánamo Bay. He builds on the scholarship on white supremacy, as he discusses the schema of racism that informs state-sanctioned violence which is often subconsciously used as a rationale for fighting terrorism as it is deeply ingrained in people's minds and cannot be "unthought."[14] His findings in the Torture without Torturers paper concluded that the legal categorization of trauma is problematic as it rationalizes the inequality of police brutality on black victims because of the allowances that are given which betray the implicit assumption that they are debilitated because of their racialized status before any reprieve can be offered by the law.[15] In The logic of the slave patrol: the fantasy of black predatory violence and the use of force by the police, he studied the 2014 shootings and discovered that in the instance McDonald shooting, the gun helped in reproducing the fantasy of Black predatory violence that stems from slavery.[16] While examining the mechanisms used by African American residents in a low-income community in the Westside of Chicago, he gained valuable insights in the ways in which they face a dearth of institutional resources, differ from popular expectations of mourning and thus develop the concept of "becoming aggrieved" which is not just mourning death but also about affirming life.[17] In his article on The Qualia of pain, he considers the relationship between the qualitative experience, enactments of violence and the intense silences that obscure its recognition. He argued that black urbanites could convert their experiences of injury into communal narratives by coming to terms with the qualia of pain. In another study, he detailed what wounds revealed about diversity in stigmatized groups and ethnographically examined anti-gang forums hosted by disabled ex-gang members, enabling them to save lives, making a point about it being politically strategic to inhabit the role of a "defective body" as to make claims about a violent society.[18]

• 2004 – Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation
• 2004 – Trustees Fellowship, University of Chicago
• 2005 – National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award
• 2009 – Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship, University of Chicago
• 2009 – Erskine Peters Dissertation Year Fellowship, University of Notre Dame
• 2010 – Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Post-Doctoral fellowship, University of Michigan
• 2012 – Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Research Council of the National Academies
• 2015 – Visiting Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, MA
• 2015 – Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, Carnegie Corporation of New York[4]
• 2019 – Humanities Council Magic Grant, David A. Gardner ’69 Fund, Princeton University
• 2021 – Fellowship, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University[6]
• 2021 – John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship[3]