Brian Goldstone, Ph.D.

Brian Goldstone, Ph.D. (FAN ’25), is a journalist and author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, published in 2025. The book was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2025 by The New York Times and The Atlantic, and selected as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year.

Goldstone’s long form reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New Republic, and The California Sunday Magazine, among other publications. He has written about mental health in Ghana, life after incarceration, the plight of chronic pain sufferers during an opioid epidemic, Israel’s secretive campaign to deport African asylum seekers, and, most recently, homelessness and housing precarity. He is the editor of African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility. In 2019, he co-organized the symposium “Uncertain States: Narrative Journalism and Its Limits” at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Goldstone received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Duke University in 2012. In 2017-2018, he was a Luce/ACLS Fellow in Journalism, Religion & International Affairs; prior to that, he was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from New America, Fulbright, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2015-2016, as a Justice-in-Education Fellow at Columbia, he taught at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York.