Noam Leshem

Professor, Department of Geography

Noam Leshem is Professor of Political Geography in Durham University’s Department of Geography and a member of the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. His research engages settler-colonial space, violent conflict and its aftermaths, and questions of cultural heritage, displacement, and state violence, with a sustained focus on Palestine/Israel and wider Middle East and North Africa contexts. He works collaboratively with communities and cultural institutions, emphasising creative methods and public-facing scholarship to examine cultural sovereignty and self-determination under conditions of exclusion and mobility restriction. He is Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project Occupation Debris (2024–2026), which explores how displaced Palestinian communities can shape the fate of cultural heritage collections when denied access to ancestral land. Leshem is the author of Life After Ruin: The Struggles over Israel’s Depopulated Arab Spaces (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man’s Land (University of Chicago Press, 2024), advancing critical debates on ruination, abandonment and contemporary sovereignty.