Benjamin N. Lawrance

Benjamin N. Lawrance is Professor of African History at the University of Arizona and a lawyer. A graduate of Stanford University, University College London, and the University of Arizona, his research interests include comparative and contemporary slavery, human trafficking, cuisine and globalization, human rights, refugee issues and asylum policies.

His most recent books explore exile, citizenship, and forced marriage. Forthcoming works examine widowhood in Africa, and the life and writings of the South African author, Dugmore Boetie.

His 2014 book, Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling (Yale) examined West African child smuggling in the 19th century. His other books examine asylum, refugee issues, expert testimony, historical and contemporary trafficking in women and children in Africa. His essays appear in the Medical Anthropology, Journal of African History, Biography, Slavery & Abolition, African Economic History, Anthropological Quarterly, Cahiers d'Études Africaines, and the African Studies Review, 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 six hundred asylum claims of West Africans in the U.S., Canada, the U.K, the Netherlands, Israel, and many other countries, and his opinions have featured in appellate rulings in the U.S. and the U.K.