Department of Sociology and Anthropology
The Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Chair in International Studies
Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Chair in International Studies
Held by:
Benjamin N. Lawrance
bnl@rit.edu
View Bio
The Conable Chair in International Studies honors the former Rochester-area politician and diplomat, Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr., who served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1964-1984) and as president of the World Bank (1986-1991). The Conable Chair was made possible with a generous starting gift from the Starr Foundation.
The current occupant of the Conable Chair is Benjamin N. Lawrance.
Benjamin N. Lawrance is a graduate of Stanford University and University College London, and his research interests include comparative and contemporary slavery and trafficking, citizenship, human rights, and asylum and refugee law. Professor Lawrance is currently working on several volumes exploring the experiences of individuals who cannot prove their citizenship status (with Jacqueline Stevens), the role of experts and expert testimony in the context of asylum and refugee claims, and the relationship between courts, lawyers and experts in asylum law. He is the author of six books.
Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experiences of Women and Children in Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012, “New African Histories” Series), with Richard L. Roberts. http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Trafficking+in+Slavery's+Wake
Local Foods Meet Global Foodways: Tasting History (New York: Routledge/Taylor Francis, 2012), with Carolyn de la Peña http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415697750
Locality, Mobility and ‘Nation’: Periurban Colonialism in Togo’s Eweland, 1900-1960 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007) http://www.urpress.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=9969
Reviewed in Journal of African History, American Historical Review, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, The Historian, African Studies Review, H-Net-Reviews Africa, Choice, African Studies Quarterly, African & Asian Studies, International History Review, International Journal of African Historical Studies, Journal of World History, H-Net Reviews Germany
Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) with Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts [Reprinted 2013]. http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/3820.htm
Reviewed in International Journal of African Historical Studies, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, H-Net-Reviews, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Overseas Pensioner, African Studies Review, Africa Today, Monthly Review, Africa: Journal of international Africa Institute
The Ewe of Togo and Benin, Volume III in the “Handbook of Eweland” series (Accra, Ghana: Woeli Publishing Service, 2005)
His essays appear in the Anthropological Quarterly, Cahiers d'Études Africaines, International Labor and Working Class History, Food & Foodways, the Journal of African History, African Economic History, the African Studies Review, and the Seattle Journal of Social Justice, among others.
Professor Lawrance is a legal consultant on the contemporary political, social and cultural climate in West Africa. He has served as an expert witness for over one hundred and eighty asylum claims of West Africans in the U.S., Canada, the U.K, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Israel, and his opinions have featured in appellate rulings in the U.S. and rulings from the Queen’s Bench in the U.K.
Professor Lawrance is the recipient of several national and international awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and fellowships at Yale, Harvard, the University of Notre Dame, the Rotary Foundation, and was an inaugural University of California President's Fellowship in the Humanities.
As the Conable Chair, Professor Lawrance supports the annual programs, namely: the Conable Global Film Series (directed by Professor Rebecca Scales); the Conable Distinguished Lecture Series; the Conable Career Development Seminar (convened by Professor Joseph Henning); and the Conable Conference in International Studies. See below for links to these programs.
Use of material attributed to the Conable Chair website is permitted under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts).