Christian Robinson

Christian Robinson is an M.A. student of Middle Eastern History, with an emphasis on refugee-making events and Western intervention in the region. His current research and proposed thesis, tentatively titled “Does the Refugee Dream of Labor?: Armenian Displacement and the Limits of Productivity in the Late Ottoman and Early Post-Ottoman Middle East," centers labor as a mode of discourse and relief in the Ottoman world as refugeehood became increasingly associated with unemployment rather than lack of place. With this dual-track approach in place, he links the preeminence of labor to the often-studied professionalization of relief workers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, asserting that humanitarians began to prescribe their recent professional journey to the refugees themselves. Through this process of prescriptive professionalization, Armenian refugees were funneled into projects as wide-ranging as cotton plantations in Madagascar and bureaucratic schools for Americanized Armenian orphans in Lebanon, making professional fulfillment and productivity the antithesis of refugeehood. His other current projects also stand at the intersection of Western intervention and the Middle East. In that, he is developing an article on trans-imperial zoology between the U.S. and the Ottoman Empire, focusing on the U.S. Army Camel Corps. His other major project relays the story of Sir William Sidney Smith, a British commander during the War of the Second Coalition, who had a penchant for masquerading as an Arab, challenging scholarly periodization of British Orientalist tropes. Before coming to FSU, Robinson completed his B.A. in history at Florida Atlantic University, where he developed “Humanizing Deities: Iconography in Early Chinese Buddhism” which would become his first major conference presentation at the 8th Humanistic Buddhism Youth Forum in Singapore in October 2025. Since then, he has presented a portion of his thesis entitled “‘They would not remain Armenians”: American Cultural Surrogacy and Negotiating Assimilation Following the Armenian Genocide” at FSU’s 2026 History Graduate Student Association Conference. As for awards, he is a recipient of the J. Leitch Wright, Jr. Award for Excellence in Research (M.A. category) and the Hamilton Lugar Scholarship to Indiana University Bloomington’s Summer Language Workshop for his Arabic studies.