MEET LAURENCE RALPH

AUTHOR OF SITO, THE TORTURE LETTERS, AND RENEGADE DREAMS

Laurence Ralph is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and professor of anthropology and public affairs at Princeton University. As the founder and co-director of Princeton’s Center on Transnational Policing (CTP), he leads research on policing in the U.S. and internationally. He spearheads numerous research projects on policing and has been awarded prestigious grants from Princeton University, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Ralph’s work focuses on the intersection of African American studies, critical medical and political anthropology, and the anthropology of policing. His research examines how systemic issues like police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade impact communities of color, particularly in urban settings. Ralph’s diverse interests span urban and medical anthropology, the study of gangs, disability, masculinity, race, and popular culture.

His first book, Renegade Dreams (University of Chicago Press, 2014), received the C. Wright Mills Award and the J.I. Staley Prize. This debut work focuses on Black youth who had been disabled as a result of gun violence. More broadly, Renegade Dreams explores how police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade have the ability to normalize injury and premature death in people of color.

His second book, The Torture Letters (University of Chicago Press, 2020), explores a decades-long scandal in which hundreds of Black men were tortured in police custody in Chicago. The Torture Letters is also the name of Ralph’s award-winning, animated short film, which is featured in The New York Times Op-Doc series.

Laurence’s latest book, Sito: An American Teenager and the City that Failed Him, was released in 2024 by Grand Central Publishing. Just months before The Torture Letters was released, Ralph’s wife received a call in the middle of the night, and she was informed that a young man who she helped to raise had been shot dead during the day in the Mission District of San Francisco. Ralph writes about the short life and tragic death of his wife’s 19-year-old family member, Luis Alberto Quiñonez, in retaliation for a gang-related murder it was known he did not commit.

Laurence’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, MSNBC, Washington Post, The Nation, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Chicago Review of Books, Boston Review, and Literary Hub, to name a few. Before joining Princeton University, Ralph held tenured appointments as a professor of African & African American studies and anthropology at Harvard University. Ralph has been awarded many fellowships for his work from the National Research Council of the National Academies and the Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellowships. He is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to immigrant parents from Guyana, he earned his Ph.D. and Masters in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology. He currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife and children.

Laurence Ralph is available for speaking engagements.