Professor Julia Laite

Early Career Fellow 2014-15, Mid-Career Fellow 2023-24

The Traffic in Women: Gender, Mobility, and Migration Control in the Twentieth Century World

This project will develop a transnational history of ‘sex trafficking’ in the early twentieth century. I will look at the discourses surrounding sex trafficking and examine how they helped to generate national and international frameworks for the control and surveillance of women’s migration. More significantly, I will explore how migrant women themselves experienced their marginalized and illicit migration, and how they navigated surveillance and migration restriction. This project will take as its intellectual starting point the idea that sex trafficking cannot be studied as a phenomenon separate from women’s migrant labour more generally, and that sex trafficking, as part of the story of globalization, has a very significant history before 1945.

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The Middle of Nowhere: Critical Family History, Settler Colonialism, and the Inheritance of Place

I want to understand what it means to have family roots in a place that was charted by imperialism, built by settler-colonialism, and marked by exploitation. Using the emerging framework of ‘critical family history’, combined with the interdisciplinary methodologies of co-production, storytelling, and archival research, this project aims to disrupt the nostalgic registers of settler-colonial belonging, and produce new and useable histories for the present. Family history and genealogy has been said to have ‘twisted roots’ in white supremacism and imperialism, but it is also the most common way people engage with and make their own histories. This award will support my research into my own family’s place in settler-colonial history and enable me to write an entangled history of individual ancestors that illuminates the wider history of the North Atlantic colonial world. The project also aims to empower family historians to tell ‘new stories’ about their families that challenge top-down narratives of imperial and racial belonging; and to develop new ways of understanding our twisted roots and troubled inheritances.

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Research outcomes

Laite, J. (2021).

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey. Profile Books. https://profilebooks.com/work/the-disappearance-of-lydia-harvey/

Laite, J. (2021).

What this 100-year-old sex trafficking case tells us about modern exploitation and justice. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/what-this-100-year-old-sex-trafficking-case-tells-us-about-modern-exploitation-and-justice-159183

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Blog posts

What Newfoundland – and Messy Family Histories – Can Tell Us About the Harms of Colonialism

ISRF Fellow Julia Laite’s family have been on Newfoundland since the 17th century. Her latest project explores ancestry, empire, exploitation – and Shanawdithit, the Beothuk woman who witnessed the death of her world under colonialism.

Areas of interest

History Migration Gender Sex Crime Family History Public History Settler Colonialism

Cohort

ECF2 MCF6

Biography

Julia Laite is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London.

Julia joined Birkbeck in 2010 after holding postdoctoral fellowships at Memorial University of Newfoundland and McGill University, Canada. Her research examines the history of migration, gender, sex and crime, as well as family history, creative history and public history. She is the author of The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey (2021), Wolfenden's Women (2020), and Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens (2012), and was principal investigator of the AHRC-funded project Trafficking Past. Her current work examines critical family history, settler colonialism and migration.

Julia is part of the editorial collective of History Workshop Journal and is on the advisory board for History Workshop Online.

Biographical details correct as of 18.09.24