Staff profile

Much of my research and writing is concerned with the intersection of violent conflict and cultural history. 

In my first book, Life After Ruin: The Struggles over Israel’s Depopulated Arab Spaces (Cambridge University Press, 2016) I sought a new approach to settler colonial space, beyond the erasure of native life and landscape. Breaking from conventional focus on explicit sites of violence and devastation, the book turns critical attention to ‘ordinary’ spaces and places where the Arab past continues to unsettle the social and political realities of the Jewish-Israeli present. Through the stories of often-overlooked places and the people who inhabit them, the book develops a more nuanced understanding of the processes that shape lived environments in the aftermath of violent conflict and mass depopulation.

I am currently working on a monograph documenting the cultural history of no-man’s land titled, Tales of Life in the Dead Zone. At its heart is an investigation of places subjected to extreme forms of abandonment and the radical abdication of sovereign care. Based on seven years of research in Colombia, Israel-Palestine, Cyprus, France and Sudan, the book is a first attempt at understanding no-man’s land as a space of contemporary political urgency, where sovereign carelessness is not an error or a failure, but systematic logic of governance. It documents the violence and harms experienced by those whose lives have been affected by these spaces, but also how no-man’s land become a complex refuge from the violence outside.

I am curious to find new ways to tell stories about scholarship and research. In collaboration with Google Arts and Culture we launched the Portraits of No-Man’s Land project, an online exhibition that combines immersive and visual storytelling. As part of the project, our team produced three Virtual Reality experiences that document the life of local communities in France, Cyprus and Colombia, the latter nominated for the 2019 Aesthetica Film Festival Award.

My research over the next few years will focus on decolonial practices of war testimony. It challenges the conventions of 20^th century war witnessing that emerge out of either international law or psychoanalysis. Based on collaborative research with combatant groups in Colombia and Israel, this work highlights practices of war testimony that resist the confines of a universalised witnessing subject. 

I’m keen to work with research students interested in violent conflict and cultural history, war testimony and colonial space. Do get in touch if you want to share ideas. 

• Cultural and Political History
• War and Violent Conflict
• Colonial & Settler Colonial Space

• Geographies of Life
• Politics - State - Space (PSS)
• Urban Worlds

• https://artsandculture.google.com/project/portraits-of-no-man-s-land

• 2019: ESRC IAA 2019 Festival of Social Science Event(£0.00 from ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics (INNOGEN))
• 2018: IAA-Reliving No Man's Land: VR Technology and new experience of political science(£10765.00 from ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics (INNOGEN))
• 2015: Nomansland to No Man's Land(£4000.00 from Royal Geographical Society)
• 2014: Re-inhabiting No-Man's Land(£3640.00 from CBRL)

• 2018: Editorial Board Member, Political Geography:
• 2015: Board Member, Royal Geographical Society Political Geography Research Group:

Available for media contact about:

• Conflict and resolution:
• International: Defence & disputes:
• Middle East:
• Citizenship, state and governance:
• Policy and politics:
• Security, territory and boundaries:
• Politicial, cultural, social history:

Authored book

• Leshem, Noam (2016). Life After Ruin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Book review

• Leshem, Noam (2011). Bloodstains on the White City: Tel Aviv’s History of Violence. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Chapter in book

• Leshem, Noam (2011). A Rough and Charmless Place: Other Spaces of History in Tel Aviv. In Urban Constellations. Gandy, Matthew Jovis. 163-167.
• Leshem Noam & Ronel, Ayala (2011). Towards a spatial history of Israel. In Memory Forgetfulness and the Construction of Space. Yacobi, Haim & Fenster, Tovi Hakibutz Hameuchad and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. 81-105.
• Leshem, Noam (2010). Memory Activism: reclaiming spatial histories in Israel. In The Politics of Cultural Memory. Burke, Lucy, Faulkner, Simon & Aulich, James Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 158-182.

Journal Article

• Leshem, Noam & Pinkerton, Alasdair (2019). Rethinking expeditions: On critical expeditionary practice. Progress in Human Geography 43(3): 496-514.
• Leshem, N. (2017). Spaces of Abandonment: Genealogies, Lives and Critical Horizons. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35(4): 620-636.
• Leshem, N. & Pinkerton, A (2016). Re-inhabiting no-man's land: genealogies, political life and critical agendas. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41(1): 41-53.
• Leshem, Noam (2015). “Over our dead bodies” Placing necropolitical activism. Political Geography 45: 34-44.
• Leshem, N. (2013). Repopulating the emptiness: a spatial critique of ruination in Israel/Palestine. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(3): 522-537.
• Leshem, Noam & Wright, Lauren A. (2009). Between Art and Catastrophe. Critical Quarterly 51(2): 113.
• Leshem, Noam (2006). Drive Beirut: The work of Richard Mosse and the iconography of war in Lebanon. Static 3.

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Leshem, Noam (2012). Leshem, Noam Beyond the Wall: Writing Conflict and History in Jerusalem. 2012.