Benjamin N. Lawrance - Featured Faculty 2011

Professor Lawrance is an accomplished author who has published a number of books and articles. His essays appear in the Law in Context, Seattle Journal of Social Justice, the International Labor and Working Class History, Food & Foodways, the Journal of African History, African Economic History, Anthropological Quarterly, Cahiers d'Études Africaines, and the African Studies Review, among others. His fifth published book, forthcoming with Ohio University Press, titled Trafficking in Slavery's Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa, is on historical and contemporary trafficking in Africa. He is also currently writing a history of West African child trafficking in the 19th century.

Lawrance also holds the Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Chair in International Studies. He is responsible for the annual Conable Distinguished Lecture series and the Conable Global Film Series. The Conable Conference in 2012 will be the first time the topic of asylum and expert testimony has been addressed from the perspective of the scholars producing expertise in immigration courts. (http://www.rit.edu/cla/conable/)

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 sixty asylum claims of West Africans in the US, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Israel, and his opinions have been featured in appellate rulings in the US and the UK.

Lawrance is the recipient of several national and international awards, including a 2011-12 faculty development fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and fellowships at Yale, Harvard, the University of Notre Dame, the Rotary Foundation, and the inaugural University of California President's Fellowship in the Humanities.