Benjamin Lawrance
Benjamin N. Lawrance (born 1973) 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