Laura Madokoro
Associate Professor – migration, humanitarianism, settler colonialism, and Active History
- MA (University of Toronto), 2000; PhD (University of British Columbia), 2012
- Email Laura Madokoro
Specialization by time period:
1900 – Today
Specialization by geographical area:
North America, Asia
Biography:
Laura is an award-winning, public-facing historian, whose research explores histories of migration, refuge, displacement, and settler colonialism. In addition to her work in the Department of History, Laura is an active member of the Migration and Diaspora Studies program at Carleton University.
From 2021 – 2026, Laura led The Disaster Lab, which explored the history of disasters, humanitarianism, and migration in Canada with a focus on the notion of “diasporic disaster citizenship”. With funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, she is currently embarked on two major research projects. The first explores the transnational history of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement and the second traces the contested nature of citizenship and internment across the British Empire during the Second World War.
A mixed-generation settler born in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, Laura rambled off along a series of different paths, including museum work in Kenya, teaching in Japan and an archivist position at Library and Archives Canada. She returned to academic life in 2007 and completed her PhD in History at the University of British Columbia in 2012 with support from SSHRC and the Trudeau Foundation. She spent the following year with the History Department at Columbia University as a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow. From 2014 to 2019 she was a faculty member with the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University.
Laura is the author of the award-winning monograph Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2016), which documents the experience of Chinese refugees during the cold war and the politics of exclusion and humanitarianism among the white settler societies of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Elusive Refuge was recognized with the Association of Asian American Studies’ Best Book in the Social Sciences for 2018, the Chinese Canadian Historical Society’s Ed Wickberg Prize and the 2016 Mershon Center Furniss Book Award.
Laura’s second book, Sanctuary in Pieces: Two Hundred Years of Flight, Fugitivity, and Resistance was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the fall 2024. Through a series of six case studies, Sanctuary in Pieces, explores the history of migration and refuge in the city of Montreal, (known as Tiohtià:ke in Mohawk and Mooniyang in Anishnabemowin. These cases include histories of black fugitivity, exiled anarchists, war resisters from the United States, and refugees from Chile, Algeria, and Pakistan. The Canadian Historical Association awarded Sanctuary in Pieces its 2025 CLIO Prize (Quebec Region) “for its originality, rigorous analysis, elegant prose, significance of contribution and timeliness.”
In addition to these major works, Laura is the author of a number of articles related to the history of migration and humanitarianism. She has published widely, including in Photography and Culture, Social History / Histoire Sociale, the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Canadian Historical Review, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association and the Urban History Review. She is also co-editor, along with Francine McKenzie and David Meren, of the Dominion of Race: Rethinking Canada’s International History (UBC Press, 2017), in which she also authored a chapter on the history of Canada’s ambivalent relationship to the international refugee regime.
As someone who cares deeply about the political implications of the historical craft, particularly as they relate to contemporary events, Laura has contributed a number of comment pieces for a variety of media outlets and sites such as The Conversation.
She is also a member of the editorial collectives at activehistory.ca and refugeehistory.org, a member of the Montreal History Group / Groupe d’Histoire de Montréal, Critical Refugee and Migration Studies Canada Collective, and co-director of Histoire Sociale / Social History. Since 2025, she has chaired the First Book Award Committee for the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. In 2020, Laura was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Laura is currently supervising a number of MA and PhD students and welcomes graduate student applications on topics related to histories of race, migration, refuge, and settler colonialism.
Selected publications:
“Whither the refugees? International organisations and “solutions” to displacement, 1921-1960,” with Megan Bradley, Merve Edilman and Chritopher Chanco, Refugee Studies Quarterly (2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdac003.
“Eurocentrism and the International Refugee Regime” in the Journal of Modern European History (February 2022), https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221077423.
Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
““Oh, Weldon Chan! Where are you hiding?” BC Studies 209 (Spring 2021): 37-62.
““Nothing to Offer in Return”: Refugees, human rights and genocide in Cambodia, 1975-1978,” International Journal 75(2) (Spring 2020): 220-236, https://doi.org/10.1177/0020702020933643.
““From Citizens to Refugees”: Japanese Canadians and the Search for Wartime Sanctuary,” Journal of American Ethnic History 39(3) (Spring 2020): 17 – 48.
“Exclusion by Other Means: Medical Testing and Chinese Migration to Canada, 1947-1967,” Histoire Sociale, Social History 52(105) (2019): 155-170.
“Un accueil paradoxal: Le silence, le colonialisme (de peuplement), et les réfugiés du Sud-Est de l’Asie, 1975 – 1989, with Thomas Jourdan, Mondes et Migrations, 2025.
“More Than a Face: Beyond Community,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 31(1) (2024), 227-250, https://doi.org/10.7202/1112554ar.
“Eurocentrism and the International Refugee Regime,” Journal of Modern European History 20(1) (February 2022), 34-39, https://doi.org/10.1177/16118944221077423.
“Peril and possibility: A contemplation of the current state of migration history and settler colonial studies in Canada,” History Compass 17(1) (2019): 1-8.
“On future research directions: Temporality and permanency in the study of migration and settler colonialism in Canada,” History Compass 17(1) (2019): 1-6.
“L’émergence du Canada sur la scène international” in Les enjeux politiques contemporains: Perspectives canadiennes edited by Jeremie Cornut, Aude-Claire Fourot, Nicolas Kenny and Rémi Leger. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2019.
“The Politics of Sanctuary: John Surratt, the Catholic Church and the US Civil War,” in Undiplomatic History: The New Study of Canada and the World edited by Phil Van Huizen and Asa McKercher. Montreal – Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.
“Contested Terrain: Debating Refugee Admissions in the Cold War” in A Nation of Immigrants Explained: Immigration Policy, American Society, and the World from 1924 to 1965 edited by Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Hsu and Maria Christina Garcia. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
“Women at Risk: Globalization, Gendered Fear, and the Canadian State,” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal (2018): 1-14.
“A Decade of Change: Refugee Movements from the Global South and the Transformation of Canada’s Immigration Framework” in Canada and the Third World: Overlapping Histories edited by Karen Dubinsky, Sean Mills and Scott Rutherford. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.
“Transactions and Trajectories: The Social Life of Chinese Migrant Photographs,” Photography and Culture 8(3) (2015): 325-344.
“Handprints in the Archives: Exploring the Emotional Life of the State,” Histoire Sociale / Social History 48(96) (2015): 25-43.
“Global Displacements and Emplacement: The Forced Exile and Resettlement Experiences of Ethnic Chinese,” with Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho and Glen Peterson, Introduction to the Special Issue of Journal of Overseas Chinese 10(2) (2014): 131-136.
“From Settler Colonialism to the Age of Migration: Archives and the Renewal of Democracy in Canada,” Archivaria 78 (2014): 153-160.
“Surveying Hong Kong in the 1950s: Western Humanitarians and the ‘Problem’ of Chinese Refugees,” Modern Asian Studies 49(2) (2014): 493-524.
“Family Reunification as International History: Rethinking Sino-Canadian Relations after 1970,” International Journal 68 (2013): 591-608.
“Seeing Migrants, Selecting Refugees: A Historical Study of Chinese settlement in Canada and New Zealand,” UNHCR New Issues in Refugee Research, Research Paper No. 252 (January 2013).
“Borders Transformed: Sovereign Concerns, Population Movements and the Making of Territorial Frontiers in Hong Kong, 1949–1967,” Journal of Refugee Studies 25(3) (2012): 407- 427.
“Social Justice, Rights and Dignity: A Call For a Critical Feminist Framework,” with May Chazan, Trudeau Foundation Papers 4(2) (2012).
“‘Slotting’ Chinese Families and Refugees, 1947-1967,” Canadian Historical Review 93(1) (2012): 25-56.
“Chinatown and Monster Homes: The Splintered Chinese Diaspora in Vancouver,” Urban History Review / Revue d’histoire urbaine XXXIX(2) (2011): 17-24.
“Good Material: Canada and the Prague Spring Refugees,” Refuge: Canada’s Periodical on Refugees 6(1) (2009): 161-171.
“Not All Refugees Are Created Equal: Canada Welcomes Sopron Students and Staff in 1956,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 19(1) (2008): 253-278.
Recent Supervisions
MA Projects
Denie Espina, “Queering Immigration: The Evolution of LGBTQIA+ Policies in Canada”, MA Migration and Diaspora Studies, Carleton University, 2025.
Katie Carson, “Towards a Transnational Understanding of the October Crisis”, MA History, Carleton University, Co-Supervision with Dr. Dominique Marshall, Awarded Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement, 2025.
Malinda Pich, “”Negotiate a River by Following its Bends; Enter a country by Following its Customs”: The Cambodian Diaspora in Canada”, MA History, Carleton University, Co-Supervision with Dr. Dominique Marshall, 2025.
Lauren Rollitt, “What’s in a Partnership? Collaboration and Relationship Building Between Local History Institutions And Indigenous Communities,” MA Public History, Carleton University, 2023.
Natalie Amato, “Discussions of the First Canadian Citizenship Act: A Comprehensive Exploration of Inclusion and Absence,” MA History w / Digital Humanities Spec., Carleton University, 2025.
Gureena Saran, “Motherland – Mother Hand”: Exploring Identity, Community & The Collaborative Artistry of South Asian Women in Abbotsford, British Columbia,” (Public History MA, co-supervision with Dr. James Opp), 2021
Marvin Phung, “Constructing Canadian Multiculturalism Through the Annual Reports on the Operation of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988-2022,” (co-supervision with Dr. Dominique Marshall), 2023
Samantha Holmes, “Beyond the Computer Centre: Exploring How Digital Resources Could Support Increased Accessibility to Records and Community Memory on the SGWU Student Occupation,” (Public History MA, co-supervision with Dr. Audra Diptee), 2022
Basma Saad, “The Representation of Iraqi Muslim Women in the Globe and Mail from 1980 to 1995,” (co-supervision with Dr. Susan Whitney), 2022
Valerie Wood, Vee in Between and “Illustrating Adoption: The Making of Vee in Between,” (Public History MA, co-supervision with Dr. David Dean), 2021
PhD
Amy Fung, “The Long Memory of Mourning: An investigation into the process of political apologies from refusal to recognition” PhD Thesis, School of Canadian and Indigenous Studies, Carleton University, 2024.