Michael Ralph

Background

About Michael Ralph

Michael Ralph is Cameron Schrier Professor and Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies and Founding Director of the Center for an Equitable Economy and Sustainable Society (e2s2) at Howard University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. My research integrates political science, economics, history, and medical anthropology through an explicit focus on debt, slavery, insurance, forensics, and incarceration. My 2015 University of Chicago Press book, Forensics of Capital, explores how Senegalese people determine who owes what to whom, in daily interactions and in geopolitics. In showing how discourses on debt are used to assess social standing, I trace how Senegal became a leader of political and economic reform in Africa. I treat forensics as a theory of capital as well as a theory of sovereignty that explains how people adjust social standing based on whether they receive payment for outstanding goods and services, as well as for crimes and offenses. The main argument of Forensics of Capital is that the social profile of an individual or country is a credit profile as well as a forensic profile. I am currently at work on two books that center on slavery, insurance, and incarceration. Life explores how the US insurance industry affixes monetary value to human life with more breadth and nuance than any scholar has yet attempted. Breaking with the consensus among historians that slave insurance is distinct from life insurance because slaves were legally classified as property, I demonstrate that life insurance was built from the legal rationale and commercial logic of marine insurance and, later, slave insurance. If my research on insurance reveals that even people who were enslaved could inhabit social standing approximating that of exploited free workers, my other current book project explores how citizens can be exploited as unpaid workers. My graphic non-fiction book, Before 13th–narrated by Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells—revises the scholarly consensus on the history of convict leasing, demonstrating that it did not begin with the 13th amendment, but several decades prior.