Noora Lori

Noora Lori is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies. Her research broadly focuses on citizenship, migration, and institutions. She studies citizenship, statelessness, temporary migration schemes and racial hierarchies in comparative perspective. Regionally, her work examines the shifting population movements accompanying state formation in the Persian Gulf, expanding the study of Middle East politics to include historic and new connections with East Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

Lori’s book, Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf (Cambridge University Press 2019), received the best book prize from the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association (2020), the Distinguished Book Award from the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies section of the International Studies Association (2021), and the Best Book in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Politics from the APSA-MENA Politics section of the American Political Science Association. She has published in the Journal of Global Security Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Oxford Handbook on Citizenship, The Shifting Border, the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, and the Journal of Politics & Society among other journals and edited volumes.  Her research has been funded by the ACLS/Mellon Foundation, the ZEIT-Stiftung “Settling into Motion” Fellowship, the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computer Engineering (BU), the Initiative on Cities (BU) (2016; 2019), as well as other grants.

Since joining BU, Lori received the Gitner Family Prize for Faculty Excellence (2015) and the CAS Templeton Award for Excellence in Student Advising (2016). She has also experimented with teaching methods, piloting a ‘digital policy incubator’ that produced Urban Refuge—an aid-mapping app for refugees designed by students at BU with pro-bono support from Microsoft.

Professor Lori is the Founding Director of the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking, which she co-directs with Professor Schilde. She serves on the steering committee of the Inter-University Committee for International Migration.