Lauren Banko

Adjunct Instructor, History

Bio

Lauren Banko is currently Wellcome Trust Research in Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of History, with support from the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, at the University of Manchester. She is instructor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of History.

Lauren’s current Wellcome Trust research project is titled Medical deportees: narrations and pathographies of health at the borders of Great Britain, Egypt, and Palestine, 1919-1949. It examines histories of 20th century medico-legal borders and puts (im)(e)migrants’ voices at its center. Drawing on historical narratives of mental, emotional, and physical disorders as produced in accounts by migrant and refugee arrivals to Britain, Egypt, and Palestine, the project analyzes the varied ways in which migrants understood and negotiated infirmities and border controls. It engages with the conceptual framework of biocredibility together with a pathographical reading of precarious migrants’ historical sources. These migrants include the forcibly displaced, refugees, and labour migrants from across Asia and Africa who attempted to enter Great Britain by sea, and Palestine and Egypt overland. Focused on a period when imperial authorities accelerated the use of biopower as a tool to manage borders, including ports, the research will foreground the transnational circulation of knowledge among refugees, displaced persons, and low-waged labourers labeled as ‘medically undesirable’. Lauren is a social historian of the modern Middle East, namely Palestine prior to 1948, and of mobility, displacement, refugees, and borders. Her work is oriented toward transimperial migration and transimperial connections, particularly as understood by the individuals, families, and communities deeply affected by colonial and imperial structures of power. She is currently working on a second monograph manuscript, titled Subverting the Documentary Regime: Licit and Illicit Mobility along the Borders of Palestine, 1920-1950. This is a social history of clandestine, illicit, and undocumented immigration to and from Palestine between 1920 and 1950 and the consequences of this movement for the individuals, families, and communities involved in the migration process. Lauren is also part of the Reckoning with Refugeedom collaborative project focusing on the voices and archives of refugees in the 20th century across geographical and temporal contexts.

Education

Ph.D.: School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, 2014

Publications

“Sayed’s journey to encampment: examining sites and scenes of economic migrant displacement in Mandate Palestine,” Journal of Refugee Studies 36 (2023)

“The quiet violence of colonialism and the uncertainty of illegibility: emotions and experiences of the deportable in Mandate Palestine,” Social History 47:2 (2022)

With Katarzyna Nowak and Peter Gatrell, “What is Refugee History, Now?,” Journal of Global History 17:1 (2022)

“Border Transgressions, Border Controls: Mobility along Palestine’s Northern Frontier, 1930- 1946,” in Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946, ed. Jordi Tejel and Ramazan Hakkı Öztan (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

“Grief, a wedding veil, and bureaucratic persecution: being refugee-adjacent in the aftermath of tragedy, 1941-1946,” Immigrants & Minorities 39:2 (2021)

“Migrants, Residents, and the Cost of Illegal Home-Making in Mandate Palestine,” Jerusalem Quarterly 84 (Winter 2020)

“ ‘A stranger from this homeland’: deportation and the ruin of lives and livelihoods during the Palestine Mandate,” Contemporary Levant 4:2 (Winter 2019)

“Keeping out the ‘undesirable elements’: the treatment of communists, transients, criminals, and the ill in Mandate Palestine,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 47:6 (Dec. 2019):

With Roberto Mazza and Steven Wagner, eds., The British Mandate in Palestine: New Histories, New Historical Agents and Re-framing Old Paradigms, Contemporary Levant 4:1 (Spring 2019).

“Refugees, displaced migrants, and the territorialization of interwar mandate Palestine,” Mashriq & Mahjar 5:2 (August 2018)

“Claiming identities in Palestine: migration and nationality under the Mandate,” Journal of Palestine Studies 46:2 (Winter 2017)

The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918-1947 (Edinburgh University Press/Oxford University Press, 2016)