Benjamin Schafer

Benjamin Schafer is a PhD candidate in American History. 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 early 2000s. The project investigates how government, civil society, and everyday citizens navigated America’s late-century crises and transformations in the challenging particularity of the Rust Belt.

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). Ben is a recipient of the 2023-24 Yale University Prize Teaching Fellowship.

Ben has served on the History Department Graduate Student Advisory Committee since September 2021 and has been a department representative in the Yale Graduate Student Assembly since May 2022. He is a member of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Executive Committee, the Yale University Library Student Advisory Committee, and the Graduate Student Assembly Steering Committee, and he has previously served on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Committee on Regulations and Discipline. He also served as the Secretary of the Student Advisory Council to the 2023-24 Yale Presidential Search Committee.