Laura Robson is a scholar of international and Middle Eastern history, with a special interest in issues of refugeedom, forced migration, and statelessness. Over the past century, the Middle East has become a geopolitical nexus, bringing together matters of war, security, energy, inequality and far more, shaping the world in which we live. In her research and teaching, Robson uses a historical approach to provide context for the critical issues within the region — and the impacts felt across the world — today.

She recently sat down for an interview to discuss teaching about the Middle East, her latest research, and returning to Yale, where she earned her PhD in 2009.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The first course you will teach at Yale is “The Modern Middle East and North Africa, 1800 to the Present.” That’s a lot of time and history to cover. What is your approach to teaching this class?

This is a general survey course that’s intended to be an introduction to the Middle East and North Africa  for students with or without knowledge of the region. It starts with the latter stages of the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s, which I think is absolutely crucial for understanding the 20th century. It makes you think about what makes the region into a logical geographical and political unit — or maybe why it’s really not — and consider the shared histories of empire that predate the nation-state and the map that we have today, which is basically a consequence of World War I.

I hope this class will appeal to students from various disciplines. I think it will be attractive to history students, of course, but also those who are interested in the Middle East more broadly to help understand the present-day issues of the region. We’ll also touch upon bigger concepts of empire, nationalism, and geographic identities, as well as migration and refugeedom — areas I’m particularly focused on and which play a prominent role in the modern history of the Middle East.

You’re an expert on the Middle East with research interests in refugeedom and displacement. Tell us more about your research.

I started off as a historian of the Middle East and I’m still centered there in a lot of respects, but my current research is a little bit more global in nature. I’ve just finished a book project, “Human Capital,” that is about international refugee policy in the modern era and how one of its primary goals has been to deploy displaced people as cheap laborers across the globe.

I’m also very interested in histories of statelessness globally, and am spending time thinking about what that has looked like both throughout history and in the present. I have a current research project that explores different iterations of statelessness across the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa in the modern era. It covers a wide range of people, from those expelled and stripped of their citizenship, to utopian projects of statelessness, to internationally driven concepts of state-free zones.

What does it mean to be stateless?

It’s people who fall outside of any citizenship or nationality status, usually on an individual level but sometimes as entire groups. So, examples of collective statelessness include Palestinians, who were rendered stateless in the war of 1948, as well as certain minority groups in the Middle East like Kurds or Assyrians. But statelessness can also appear in specific places, like border zones deliberately excepted from certain state systems — for instance, during interwar negotiations over Bedouin nomadic movement in the Syrian borderlands. More recently, we also have examples of special economic zones exempted from national legal systems for commercial purposes.

It can look a lot of different ways, and what my research focuses on is looking beyond statelessness as just a straightforward phenomenon of oppression and unpacking all of these other variations.

You have written extensively about Palestine, particularly in the historical context. How can understanding the history help explain what’s happening now, in a broader sense?

This is one of the core principles of history, not just about Palestine: It’s impossible to understand the present without also understanding the past. I often challenge my students when teaching about Palestine: Why is this tiny little space in the world such a flashpoint for global politics?

It’s partly because all of the major political happenings of the last two centuries come together in this space. The story of Palestine encompasses all the key themes of the modern era: empire, decolonization, statehood, revolution and protest, religion and the state, the expansion and contraction of economic and political rights, the long-term consequences of refugeehood and denationalization. So, when we think about Palestine, of course we have to understand its past to see what’s happening specifically there right now, but it also sheds light on so many other phenomena of our contemporary world. What are the global legacies of empire? What are the global legacies of settlement? What are the global legacies of large-scale expulsions?

These are all questions that apply to Palestine and what makes it such a pivotal space. It’s a kind of microcosm of global history over the past century. It’s a tragic story in a lot of respects for multiple actors, but it can help us understand a great deal about the rest of the world.

Is it difficult to teach about Palestine when your students have so many different viewpoints or experiences?

It’s complicated, but it’s worthwhile. One of the things that I’ve always appreciated about teaching modern history, and particularly Palestine, is that you don’t have to explain to anyone why it matters. All of the different viewpoints and knowledge have a tremendous intellectual upside; constructive dissent can be rewarding in the classroom, and in scholarship more generally. It opens up people’s minds, intellects, and political capacities to have that kind of exposure. It can be tense and it can be difficult, but I think it is profoundly worth doing.

How did you first become interested in the history of the Middle East?

I was a history major as an undergrad, but I focused on ancient history and classics. My interest really began when I went on an archeology trip to Turkey that was focused in on ancient sites, on its Greek and Roman pasts. I remember thinking how peculiar it was that I had traveled all this way to see these ancient sites and knew nothing at all about its recent history. That was the initial spark of curiosity.

At that time, in the early 2000s, there was an upsurge of interest in the Middle East — which was mostly a negative kind of attention. But it did lead a new generation of historians and scholars to be interested in the region in a new way due to its prominence in global discourse. I became especially interested in empire and the British and French legacies in the Middle East. I traveled to Lebanon as a Yale PhD student to take an intensive Arabic course in Beirut and fell in love with the place; it’s a beautiful city that has suffered tremendously in recent decades, but has a remarkable resilience and charm.

What was the subject of your PhD at Yale?

It ended up being the basis for my first book, “Colonialism and Christianity and Mandate Palestine,” about the history of the Arab Christian community in Palestine under the British mandate. In the early 1900s, Arab Christians became leaders of the Palestinian nationalist movement and the anti-Zionist movements in Palestine and then were deliberately segregated from the rest of the Palestinian population in a political and legal sense by the British colonial state. So, it focused on sectarianism and the colonial origins of that sectarianism, but also traced this little-known community that was actually very important intellectually and politically. One of my advisors was Paul Kennedy, with whom I will be co-teaching a graduate course this spring.

What excites you most about joining the Jackson community?

I’m really thrilled to be a historian in the midst of people — faculty and students — who are interested in contemporary issues and in policy. I think that there’s so much possibility for cross-disciplinary conversations about things that really matter, and I’m really looking forward to that community of interested participants from all sorts of disciplines and backgrounds and regional specialties.

Are you excited to be back in New Haven?

New Haven is a great college town, and it’s also so much more than a college town. We used to live in Wooster Square and now we live in Westville; we’ve been exploring the parks and the food, introducing our kids to all the varieties of pizza. We’re looking forward to exploring the beaches on the shoreline and the fun fall activities of fall in New England.

I’m also excited to find out more about the music scene here in New Haven; I’m a trained pianist. I’m hoping to find a choir to be a part of here, which is something I did when I was a PhD student. I’ve also taken up the banjo, which is my latest project.