Laura Robson

Laura Robson is a scholar of international and Middle Eastern history, with a special interest in questions of refugeedom, forced migration, and statelessness. She has published extensively on the topics of refugee and minority rights, forced migration, ethnic cleansing, and the emergence of international legal regimes around resettlement and asylum.

Her most recent books are The League of Nations (with Joseph Maiolo; Cambridge, 2025), a reconsideration of the meaning and import of this first experiment in formal internationalism, and Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work (Verso, 2023), a wide-ranging investigation of the many twentieth century schemes to deploy refugees as labor migrants across the globe. She is also the author of The 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), as well as editor of Partitions: A Transnational History of 20th Century Territorial Separatism (with Arie Dubnov; Stanford, 2019) and Minorities and the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives (Syracuse, 2016). With Jennifer Dueck, she is the co-founder and co-editor of StatelessHistories.org, a digital humanities project exploring the varied and multifaceted experience of statelessness in the modern era.

Robson’s current research includes one project documenting the active production and deliberate maintenance of different forms of statelessness across the globe during the long twentieth century, and another on Palestine’s emergence as a laboratory for the development of new and highly interventionist forms of colonial and postcolonial internationalism.