Laura Acosta is a Postdoctoral Fellow in International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Northwestern University. Before joining Brown, Laura taught courses on social inequality, political sociology, and research methods at Trinity College Dublin. Her research brings a historical and comparative perspective to questions of nation formation and the construction and transformation of social identities and symbolic boundaries over time, especially as these processes sustain violence and war.

Her research has been published in Theory and Society, Social Forces, and Quality & Quantity, and has received awards and honors from four different sections of the American Sociological Association: Culture; Human Rights; Theory; and Peace, War, and Social Conflict.