Reuben Jonathan Miller is an Associate Professor in the University of Chicago Crown Family School and in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. His research, which focuses on race, punishment, and social welfare policy is published in journals across the social sciences. In 2021, Miller published his first sole authored book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, which won a number of awards, including the 2023 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology, the 2022 Herbert Jacob Book Prize from the Law and Society Association and two PROSE Awards from the Association of American Publisher’s, including the award for Excellence in Social Science. Halfway Home was also a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize for Current Affairs and the Pen America John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction. In 2022, Miller was selected as a MacArthur Fellow, the so called “genius award”, with the prize committee noting that "Miller is modeling a way to write about his subjects that refuses to reduce them to their hardships, and he is illuminating how the American carceral system reshapes individuals' lives and relationships long after their time has been served.” He is currently conducting a transnational study of black emancipation in port cities along the transatlantic slave trade route and a study of violence and our responses to it. 

Reuben Jonathan Miller, PhD
Associate Professor
Crown Family School and the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity
University of Chicago

Research Professor
The American Bar Foundation  

2022 MacArthur Fellow

Author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Portrait photo credit: Jonathan Miller