Dr Anne Irfan

Dr Anne Irfan is Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at UCL. Her work examines colonial legacies in displacement and bordering practices, focusing on Palestinian refugee history and the modern Middle East. A trained historian, she is also interested in questions around post-war internationalism and the UN, archival suppression, and the global refugee regime. Before joining UCL, Anne was Lecturer in Forced Migration at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre. She is Principal Investigator (PI) on the British Academy-funded project ‘Borders, global governance and the refugee, 1947-51’.

Anne is the author of Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the international refugee system, available with Columbia University Press. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Refugee Studies, Journal of Palestine Studies, Contemporary Levant, Forced Migration Review and Jerusalem Quarterly. She won the 2020 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies for her article ‘Educating Palestinian refugees: The origins of UNRWA’s unique schooling system’; the 2020 Contemporary Levant Best Paper Award for ‘Petitioning for Palestine: refugee appeals to international authorities’; and the 2017 Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Outstanding Essay on Jerusalem for ‘Is Jerusalem international or Palestinian? Rethinking UNGA Resolution 181.’ 

Teaching

Anne is module convenor for BASC0042 Race, Gender and Feminism and BASC0053 Approaches to Interdisciplinarity.