Dr Noam Leshem is a political geographer specialising in cultural history and violent conflict. He has worked across the Middle East and northeast Africa, with particular emphasis on history and politics in Palestine and Israel. He is an Associate Professor of Political Geography and holds additional affiliations with the Durham Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, as well as the Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society and Politics.
After completing his doctorate at the University of London in 2010, Dr Leshem taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, before joining the Department of Geography at Durham University in 2013. He received the Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize in 2011 for his work on Palestinian urban history in post-1948 Israel. This research was the subject of his first book, Life After Ruin: The Struggles over Israel’s Depopulated Palestinian Spaces, which was published by the Middle East Series of Cambridge University Press. Leshem’s second research monograph, Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man’s Land, is published by Chicago University Press. This book sets out a new agenda in the study of no-man’s land and is grounded in over a decade of grounded research around the world, including Palestine, Israel, Sudan, Syria and Cyprus.
Dr Leshem is currently the Principal Investigator of Occupation Debris, a large research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2023-2026), which explores collections of modern Palestinian cultural heritage excavated by Israeli archaeologists. This work entails the involvement of Palestinian communities across the Middle East and the wider Palestinian diaspora, and is a pioneering effort to understand the challenges displaced communities face in accessing and asserting agency over cultural heritage collections.