MsLaura Stocker

Laura is a historian of the modern Middle East. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow on the ERC-funded project CAPITALEAST: Global Capitalism and Rurality: Agency, Commodification, and the Socio-Ecological Transformation of the Middle Eastern Countryside, 1870–1945. Her research examines the Bedouin economy in the Middle East, focusing on its integration into capitalist trade networks, the impact of colonial developmentalism, and socio-economic transformations within local communities that accompanied these processes during the 1930s and 1940s.

Laura completed her PhD at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) in 2026. Her dissertation examines the political history of Bedouin tribes in the post-Ottoman Middle East, focusing on the Ruwalla and Shammar Jarba tribal confederations and their role in state- and border-making during the transition from empire to nation-states.