Benjamin Schafer

Benjamin Schafer is a PhD student in U.S. History originally from Buffalo, New York. He studies urban and social history in the late-twentieth-century United States, especially the Great Lakes and Rust Belt region. His work examines the social, political, and economic transformations of urban communities in the wake of deindustrialization, and he is a practicing oral historian.

Prior to Yale, Benjamin 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. Benjamin also holds an MPhil in Economic and Social History from Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. He works as a research assistant for Professors Elizabeth Hinton and Vaness Ogle and has previously worked as a researcher for Professor Fredrik Logevall (Harvard) and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

Benjamin has served on the History Department’s Graduate Student Advisory Committee since September 2021 and has been a department representative on 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 GSA Steering Committee, and he has previously served on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Committee on Regulations and Discipline. In New Haven, he is a member of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church, where he serves as a lector and Eucharistic minister.

 

Please feel free to be in touch with questions about research, the PhD program, or any relevant topic.