Benjamin N. Lawrance

I’m a legal historian and licensed attorney and work in Africa and with African migrants around the globe. I research, teach, and practice in a dynamic interdisciplinary field. I particularly enjoy representing asylum seekers in immigration proceedings and related legal matters.

I have authored and edited twenty books covering a broad range of topics and themes. My current research explores mobility, labor, and exploitation through time and space. I am currently working on three books: one is a comparative African socio-legal history of copyright and intellectual property deprivation; a second (co-authored with Vusumuzi R. Kumalo) explores the career and creative work of an apartheid-era South African writer, Dugmore Boetie; a third narrates the contemporary African experience of asylum mobilities by exploring themes and problems in the global refugee-migrant experience. I am also the series editor for the new A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking.

Over several decades, and with various collaborators (many with the shared experience of Richard L. Roberts’ mentorship), I have advanced an innovative socio-legal historical methodology probing African legal subjectivities and humanitarian issues. This approach exposes how contemporary debates about global rights and abuses often have rich and complex socio-legal African underpinnings, as evidenced by critical interdisciplinary contributions on the subjects as varied as contemporary slavery and human trafficking, forced marriage, exile, asylum claiming, and widowhood (forthcoming with Ohio UP in 2025), among others. A common thread in all my work is a desire to foster collaborative and interdisciplinary writing and networking across the continent, a practice that first began with my most cited work. Over more than two decades, I have co-authored with over three dozen African studies scholars, including many former students and emerging scholars based in Africa.

My current scholarship builds on an earlier interest in recoverying African agency in coerced mobilities and forced migrations. My first monograph — Locality, Mobility and 'Nation' (Rochester 2007) — examined the experiences of Ewe men and women under French mandate rule in Togo, and appeared in French in 2022. My second monograph — Amistad's Orphans (Yale 2014) — examined West African child smuggling in the nineteenth century, rethinking the famous Amistad Supreme Court case from the perspective of the six African children embroiled in the horrifying saga.

I am active in interdisciplinary African studies in the US, UK, and elsewhere. I am a Life Member of the African Studies Associations of Africa, the USA, and the UK, and a number of other professional organizations. I was the Editor-in-Chief of the African Studies Review, the flagship journal of the African Studies Association (USA) from 2018 to 2022. Along with Bill Moseley, I co-chaired the 59th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in 2016, with the theme: "Imaging Africa at the Center: Bridging Scholarship, Policy, and Representation in African Studies."

I teach a range of courses at different levels on African history, slavery, law, food & cuisine, refugees/asylum, migration, and related subjects. I teach in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and in the James E. Rogers College of Law. I am not currently admitting new doctoral students.

If you are seeking legal representation or expert testimony for a pending case, please email me at my non-UA address.