Dr.
Lauren Banko

I am a social historian of modern Palestine and the wider Arab Middle East, as well as a historian of migration, refugees, and borders with a focus on ‘transregional’ individuals and groups in the Arab Middle East. My approach to research on Palestine and the Arab Middle East engages with microhistory as a way to understand experiences and narrations of displacement, mobility, and border controls, especially by transregional or transimperial migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.

 

I am currently Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Manchester and adjunct instructor/lecturer in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University.

 

My early work was on the history and conceptualisations of citizenship and nationality among Arab Palestinians in Palestine and Palestinian emigres during the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948). This was the focus of my first book published in 2016 by Edinburgh University Press, The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918-1947.

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Between 2015-2018, I held the role of Postdoctoral Research Associate in Palestine/Israel Studies at the University of Manchester in the department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies.

From 2021-2021, I was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project led by Professor Peter Gatrell at the University of Manchester titled ‘Reckoning with Refugeedom: refugee voices in modern history.’