Laurence Ralph

Laurence Ralph is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he is the Director for the Center on Transnational Policing. His scholarly work explores how the historical circumstances of police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade naturalize disease, disability, and premature death for urban residents, who are often seen as expendable. Theoretically, his research resides at the nexus of critical medical and political anthropology, African American studies, and the emerging scholarship on disability. He combines these literatures to show how violence and injury play a central role in the daily lives of black urbanites. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago, winner of the C. Wright Mills Award; and The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. He is also director of the animated short film The Torture Letters.

Ralph has held The Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a visiting fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and membership at the Institute for Advanced Study. He earned his Ph.D. from University of Chicago and was previously on the faculty of Harvard University.