Ben Mauk is a writer and filmmaker. Before joining Case Western, he worked as a freelance journalist in Berlin, Germany for over a decade, reporting on migration, nationalism, and the politics of borders and peripheries. His writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. His first book, The Fugitive World, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ben is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning journalist whose work has been anthologized three times in the Best American series and twice nominated for the National Magazine Award. His other honors include two Online Journalism Awards, a Deadline Club Award, and the inaugural Jamal Khashoggi Award for Courageous Journalism. He is a 2024 National Fellow at New America and a 2023-24 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.

As a magazine writer, Ben has written about hiking trails in Iraqi Kurdistan, floating villages in Cambodia, and uranium mining in the American West. His first documentary film, Reeducated, is part of “Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State,” a multimedia New Yorker project on life inside a Chinese reeducation camp. The film won jury prizes from SXSW and NewImages and has screened at more than 30 festivals.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied fiction, Ben co-founded the Berlin Writers’ Workshop and served as director from 2017 to 2024. His web site is www.ben-mauk.com.