Dr. Laura Robson

Biography

Laura Robson is the Elihu Professor of Global Affairs at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. She is a scholar of international Middle Eastern history with a special interest in issues of refugeedom, forced migration, and statelessness. Robson has published extensively on topics such as refugee and minority rights, forced migration, and ethnic cleansing, and has explored the emergence of international legal regimes related to resettlement and asylum. Her recent works include 'The League of Nations' (co-authored with Joseph Maiolo; Cambridge, 2025), which offers a reconsideration of internationalism, and 'Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work' (Verso, 2023). She also authored 'The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East' (Oxford, 2020) and 'States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East' (University of California, 2017). Additionally, Robson edited '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 a co-founder and co-editor of StatelessHistories.org, a digital humanities project that explores the varied experiences of statelessness in the modern era. Her current research includes documenting the active production and maintenance of forms of statelessness globally throughout the long twentieth century, with a particular focus on the role of Palestine as a site for developing new colonial and postcolonial internationalism.

Research Interests