Dr. Laura Robson

Biography

Laura Robson is a scholar of international Middle Eastern history, with a special interest in questions of refugeedom, forced migration, and statelessness. She has published extensively on topics such as refugee and minority rights, forced migration, and ethnic cleansing, as well as the emergence of international legal regimes around resettlement and asylum. Her recent books include 'The League of Nations' (with Joseph Maiolo, Cambridge, 2025), which is a reconsideration of the meaning and import of the experiment of formal internationalism, and 'Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work' (Verso, 2023), a wide-ranging investigation into twentieth-century schemes that deploy refugees as labor migrants across the globe. She is also the author of 'Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East' (Oxford, 2020), 'States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East' (University of California, 2017), and 'Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine' (University of Texas, 2011). Furthermore, Robson is the editor of 'Partitions: A Transnational History of 20th Century Territorial Separatism' (with Arie Dubnov; Stanford, 2019) and 'Minorities in the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives' (Syracuse, 2016). She is the co-founder and co-editor of StatelessHistories.org, a digital humanities project that explores the varied and multifaceted experiences of statelessness in the modern era. Robson’s current research includes a project documenting the active production and deliberate maintenance of forms of statelessness around the globe in the long twentieth century, with a focus on Palestine as a case study for the development of new, highly interventionist forms of colonial and postcolonial internationalism.

Research Interests