Laura Almagor specializes in modern Jewish history and is particularly interested in the intersection of Jewish history and issues of migration, colonialism and postcolonialism, as well as in various manifestations of (Jewish and non-Jewish) nationalist and internationalist ideologies. Moreover, her teaching and research activities have dealt with historiographical debates about the Holocaust, Yiddish and Yiddishism, the development of the scholarly field of Nationalism Studies, and post-1945 (Jewish) refugee issues. 

Laura’s first monograph Beyond Zion: The Jewish Territorialist Movement, was published by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in 2022. This book deals with the Jewish Territorialists, who looked for places of settlement for Jews outside both Europe and Palestine. Laura argues that the Territorialist movement should be understood both as part of a larger narrative of Jewish political behaviour, and as a manifestation of wider geopolitical trends and discourses related to issues of migration, colonialism and population politics.

Together with Dr. Haakon Ikonomou and Dr. Gunvor Simonsen (Copenhagen University), Laura co-edited Global Biographies: Lived History as Method, published by Manchester University Press in 2022. She also co-leads the Global Biography Research Network GloBio: www.global.bio. Her current project focusses on the connections between the post-1945 Jewish refugee crisis and the era of decolonization.

Laura received her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence in 2015. Before joining Utrecht University in January 2023, she was a lecturer at the University of Sheffield. She has also held fellowships at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the Center for Jewish History in New York City, and the Central European University in Budapest, and she was a Teaching Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Department of International History, and a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Military History.