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Lisa Bhungalia

Department of Geography
Assistant Professor
Campus:
Kent
Contact Information
Email:
lbhungal@kent.edu

Biography

Dr. Lisa Bhungalia is a political geographer researching late-modern war, law, empire, and transnational linkages between the US and Southwest Asian and North African region. Her first book, Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine, published by Stanford University Press in December 2023, examines the entanglements of aid, law, and war in Palestine with attention to the surveillance and policing regimes produced through the embedding of counterterrorism laws and infrastructures into civilian aid flows. She is also currently developing new research on the social lives of terrorism databases. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, and Palestinian American Research Center, among other bodies, and her published work has appeared in Politics and Space, Political Geography, Geopolitics, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Society and Space, Environment and Planning A, Middle East Report, and Jadaliyya, among other venues.

Education

Ph.D. in Geography, Syracuse University; M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought, New York University; B.A. in English, Ohio State University

Publications

  • 2023. Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine. Stanford: Stanford University Press (In the “Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures” series)
  • Forthcoming. “Gaza as norm” in the forum on Decolonizing Palestine by Somdeep Sen. International Politics.
  • 2022. “Governing Suspects: Race and Economies of Threat in American Warfare” in Insecurity, ed. R. Grusin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 95-114.
  • 2022. “Refashioning Liberal Empire: Abject Whiteness, Domestic Terrorism, and the Multicultural Security State.” Small Wars & Insurgencies, Co-authored with Andrea Miller.
  • 2020. “Laughing at power: Humor, transgression, and the politics of refusal in Palestine.” Politics & Space. Politics & Space 38(3): 387–404.
  • 2020. Book Review. “Violence Beyond the Market,” a response to Violence Work by Micol Seigel. Society & Space Open Site. Co-authored with Rhys Machold.
  • 2019. “The Shifting Contours of US Power and Intervention in Palestine.” Middle East Report 290: 13-19. Co-authored with Jeannette Greven and Tahani Mustafa.
  • 2018. “Governing Terror: Aid, Security, and War in Palestine” in “Interventions – (Re)thinking the Politics of Governing the Ungovernable,” eds. Fouad Marei and Mona Atia, Political Geography 67: 176-186.
  • 2018. “Governing Banishment: Settler-colonialism, Territory, and Life in an Economy of Death” in Geographies of Power, eds. J. Agnew and M. Coleman. London: Edward Elgar, pp. 313-331.
  • 2017. Book Review: Benevolent Empire: U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World's Dispossessed by Stephen Porter. International Migration Review, January 2018.
  • 2017. “1967’s “Ghosts: Beyond a Truncated Imaginary.” Forum: Fifty Years of Occupation Middle East Research and Information Project. 7 June
  • 2016. Book Review: Police Encounters: Security and Surveillance in Gaza under Egyptian Rule by Ilana Feldman. Theoretical Criminology 20(4): 525-528.
  • 2016. “On USAID, soft power, and American globalism.” Review of Development, Security, and Aid: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics at the US Agency for International Development by Jamie Essex. Dialogues in Human Geography 6(1): 88-90.
  • 2015. “Managing Violence: Aid, Counterinsurgency, and the Humanitarian Present in Palestine.” Environment and Planning A 47(11): 2308-2323.
  • 2015. “Introduction: Geographies of Humanitarian Violence.” Environment and Planning A 47(11): 2232 –2239. Co-authored with Patricia Lopez and Leonie Newhouse.
  • 2014. Book Review. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism by Judith Butler. Society and Space, Open Site.
  • 2012. “Im/Mobilities in a ‘Hostile Territory’: Managing the Red Line.’” Geopolitics 17(2): 256-275.
  • 2010. “A Liminal Territory: Gaza, Executive Discretion and Sanctions Turned Humanitarian.” GeoJournal 75(4): 347-357.

    Awards/Achievements

    • American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
    • Palestinian American Research Center Fellowship
    • Mershon Center for International Security Studies Faculty Research Grant
    • PARC Fellowship for Dissertation Research
    • National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant
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