Chris Benson Special Interest Christopher Benson is an Associate Professor of African American Studies, and Journalism at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign. He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in journalism at the University of Illinois and his J.D. at Georgetown University. He has worked as a city hall reporter in Chicago for an area radio station, and as Features Editor and Washington Editor for Ebony magazine. He also has written for Chicago, Savoy, Jet, and Crisis magazines, and he has contributed to The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times and Reader's Digest. Chris served as a co-writer and associate producer of the WTTW Channel 11 documentary "Paper Trail: 100 Years of the Chicago Defender,"broadcast by the Chicago PBS station in June 2005, and winner of the 2005 Peter Lisagor Award for exemplary journalism (documentary) by the Chicago Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalist.