Bellagio Residency: November 2023
Project: “The Least of These: Empire, Freedom and the Many Uses of Violence”
Reuben Jonathan Miller is an award-winning scholar and author on issues of crime, punishment, racism, and poverty. In 2021 he published Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, an ethnographic study of life in the era of mass incarceration. Halfway Home won a number of awards and was a finalist for both an LA Times Book Prize and the Pen America John Kenneth Galbraith Award. In 2022, Miller was selected as a MacArthur Fellow. He came to Bellagio in November 2023 to work on a new project, one of the first comparative transnational studies of black emancipation in slave economies that took part in the transatlantic slave trade. The Least of These reveals how a nation’s response to black freedom shapes the trajectories of its most vulnerable residents today. Miller is an associate professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work and in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. He is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation.