Benjamin Lawrance


Benjamin N. Lawrance is a legal historian who works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa, with a particular focus on West Africa. Until 2017, he was the Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Professor of International Studies in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He works on comparative and contemporary slavery and trafficking, citizenship, human rights, and the law of asylum and refugees. He is currently Professor of African History at the University of Arizona.
Benjamin Lawrance currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the African Studies Review, the flagship journal of the African Studies Association.

Life

Benjamin Lawrance was born in York, England, and emigrated to Australia as a child. He attended Barker College for high school. He returned to the U.K. for undergraduate and graduate education at University College London. He moved to the U.S.A. for graduate study in 1996 at Stanford University. After graduate school he taught at several institutions, including Stanford University, the University of San Francisco, California State University at San Bernardino, and the University of California, Davis.
He became the Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Professor of International Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a position which honors Barber Conable. Subsequently, he took a position at the University of Arizona.
He serves on the Advisory Board of PROTECT: the National Association for the Protection of Children.

Works

Benjamin Lawrance's earlier work focused on the connection between twentieth-century Ewe identity creation and the creation of a specific periurban zone in southern Togo. Lawrance has also published several edited collections, including "Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa" and "Trafficking in Slavery's Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa".
  • 2017. Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness with Jacqueline Stevens
  • 2016. Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa with Anne Bunting and Richard L. Roberts
  • 2015. African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights, with Iris Berger, Meredith Terretta, Jo Tague, and Trish Hepner Redeker.
  • 2015. Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony, with Galya Ruffer.
  • 2014. Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling
  • 2012. Trafficking in Slavery's Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa, with .
  • 2012. Local Foods Meet Global Foodways: Tasting History, with 978-0415697750
  • 2007. Locality, Mobility and ‘Nation’: Periurban Colonialism in Togo's Eweland, 1900-1960.
  • 2006. Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa with and Richard L. Roberts .
  • 2005. The Ewe of Togo and Benin, Volume III in the "Handbook of Eweland" series

    Interests

With Jacqueline Stevens, Lawrance is currently exploring the experiences of individuals who cannot prove their citizenship or identity.
Lawrance regularly serves as a legal consultant on the contemporary political, social and cultural climate in West Africa for ongoing immigration matters. He has served as an expert witness for over two hundred asylum claims of West Africans, including many from Togo. He has been an expert in different national jurisdictions, including the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, the U.K, Israel, Hong Kong, and South Korea, and his opinions have featured in several appellate rulings in the U.S. and rulings from the Queen's Bench in the U.K.
He is an Editor for CIHA Blog, Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa.