Benoît Henriet obtained his PhD in Contemporary History in 2016 from the Université Saint-Louis in Brussels. In 2017, he was appointed as short-term postdoctoral fellow at the Centre Marc Bloch-Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and, in 2017-2018, as Associate researcher in the Comparing the Copperbelt project led by Prof. Miles Larmer at the University of Oxford. He left this position in October 2018 to become assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Henriet specializes in the history from below, and in the microhistories of (post)colonial Central Africa. He focuses more specifically on vernacular experiences of and responses to state power and to capitalism. He published his first monograph, Colonial Impotence, in 2021, and has steadily contributed to journals including Gender & History, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of African Historical Studies.

Together with Prof. Dr. Amandine Lauro (ULB), Henriet is one of the two academic coordinators of the projects Rebel Soldiers on Trial: Military Agency and its Repression in Colonial Congo (WEAVE: FNRS-FWO funding) and DIGICOLJUST-2: Military Violence and its (Dis)Contents in Colonial Congo: Sharing the Records, Writing the History (BELSPO-BRAIN funding). Since October 2023, he is also the principal investigator of FORAGENCY: Foraging, Colonialism and More-than-Human Agency in Central Africa (ERC Starting Grant project number 101075882).