Benjamin Schafer

Benjamin Schafer is a PhD candidate in American History currently serving as the Yale College Dean’s Office Fellow in Academic Advising and Student Support. He studies urban and social history in the late-twentieth-century United States. His dissertation, “Life and Death in Rust,” is a study of poverty and inequality in post-industrial Buffalo, NY, his hometown, from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s. The project investigates the substance abuse crisis in Buffalo’s black community in this period, showing how leaders failed to respond to the first round of “diseases of despair” in the Rust Belt well before the opioid crisis of the 2000s and 2010s.

Prior to Yale, Ben received an AB, magna cum laude with highest honors; Phi Beta Kappa, in History with a secondary in African American Studies from Harvard College, where he was awarded the Thomas T. Hoopes Senior Thesis Prize, the David Herbert Donald Prize in American History, and the Rev. Peter J. Gomes Prize in Religion and Ethnicity. He also holds an MPhil in Economic and Social History from Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. He has worked as a researcher for Professors Elizabeth Hinton and Vanessa Ogle (Yale), Professor Fredrik Logevall (Harvard), and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. He has been a Teaching Fellow for Professors Arne Westad (Fall 2024, The Twentieth Century: A World History), David Engerman (Fall 2023, The Origins of U.S. Global Power), and Marco Ramos (Spring 2023, The History of Drugs in America). He also taught his own seminar, “Urban America in Turmoil and Transformation, 1975-Present,” in the Spring 2025 semester. Ben is a recipient of the 2023-24 Yale University Prize Teaching Fellowship. He has been a fellow of the Modern U.S. History Workshop since 2022 and co-coordinates the graduate working group in Twentieth-Century U.S. History.

Ben served on the History Department Graduate Student Advisory Committee from 2021 to 2024 and was a department representative in the Yale Graduate Student Assembly from 2022 to 2025. He has been a member of the Yale University Library Student Advisory Committee since 2023 and previously served as a member of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Executive Committee (2023-2025), the Graduate Student Assembly Steering Committee (2023-2024), and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Committee on Regulations and Discipline (2022-2023). He also served as the Secretary of the Student Advisory Council to the 2023-24 Yale Presidential Search Committee. He is currently serving his first term on the Board of Directors of Dwight Hall at Yale, the University’s nonprofit center for public service and social justice.