Community Calendar

This lecture traces the unfolding conflict in the Middle East over the past two and a half years, examining how each development shaped the next. Drawing on deep historical roots, it explores why these disputes have proved so enduring, so emotionally wrought and so hard to end.

CHRISTINA MICHELMORE received her BA from Smith College and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. She lived and worked in the Middle East for seven years—in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Pakistan. In 1984, she joined Chatham University’s history department, which she chaired off and on for 30 years. She wrote academic articles on American views of Muslims and Arabs and contributed Op Eds on U.S. foreign policy. After 9/11, she focused on public education about Middle Eastern people, cultures, and politics. She directed the “Communities of Islam” program in 2002 and was named Pennsylvania International Educator of the Year in 2004–2005. She retired in 2014.

Please register using the ticket link below to save your spot and for event communication.

The advent of internationalist refugee aid has long been told as an inspirational story of humanitarians fighting tirelessly for a system for that would recognize and guarantee the rights of displaced and dispossessed people. But thinking historically about the genesis of modern refugee policy tells us that has long had a different goal: to make use of refugees as cheap workers in an emerging system of global industrial capitalism. This talk traces the century-long history of the ways in which modern refugee regimes have sought not to protect refugee rights but to remake refugees as migrant labor, serving the interests of states and capital rather than the interests of displaced people themselves.

This is brought to you in partnership with the NMC International Affairs Forum. Registration is required. Livestreaming is available.

LAURA ROBSON, Elihu Professor of Global Affairs and History at Yale University, is a scholar of international and Middle Eastern history, with a special interest in questions of refugeedom, forced migration, and statelessness. She has published extensively on the topics of refugee and minority rights, forced migration, ethnic cleansing, and the emergence of international legal regimes around resettlement and asylum. She received her PhD from Yale in 2009 and holds additional degrees from Tulane University, the Royal Academy of Music, and Oxford University.