Lisa Bhungalia

Lisa Bhungalia is an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on 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 deepening 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 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.

A link to her faculty profile can be found here.

Selected Publications

Bhungalia, L. 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].

Miller A. and L. Bhungalia. 2022. “The fungible terrorist: abject whiteness, domestic terrorism, and the multicultural security state.” Small Wars & Insurgencies 33(4-5): 902-925.

Bhungalia, L. 2022. “Governing Suspects: Race and Economies of Threat in American Warfare” in Insecurity, ed. R. Grusin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 95-114.

Bhungalia, L. 2020. “Laughing at power: Humor, transgression, and the politics of refusal in Palestine.” Politics & Space 38(3): 387–404.

Machold, R. and L. Bhungalia. 2020. “Violence Beyond the Market,” a response to Violence Work by Micol Seigel. Society & Space Open Site.

Bhungalia, L., J. Greven and T. Mustafa. 2019. “The Shifting Contours of US Power and Intervention in Palestine.” Middle East Report 290: 13-19.

Bhungalia, L. 2018. “Governing Banishment: Settler-colonialism, Territory, and Life in an Economy of Death” in Handbook on the Geographies of Power, eds. M. Coleman and J. Agnew. London: Edward Elgar, pp. 313-331.

Bhungalia, L. 2018. “Governing Terror: Risk, Race, and the Deep Policing of Aid in Palestine,” in Marei, F.G., et al., Interventions on the Politics of Governing the “Ungovernable,” Political Geography 67: 176-186.

Bhungalia, L. 2017. “1967’s “Ghosts: Beyond a Truncated Imaginary.” Forum: Fifty Years of Occupation Middle East Research and Information Project. 7 June.

Bhungalia, L. 2015. “Managing Violence: Aid, Counterinsurgency, and the Humanitarian Present in Palestine.” Environment and Planning A 47(11): 2308-2323.

Lopez, P., L. Bhungalia and L. Newhouse. 2015. “Introduction: Geographies of Humanitarian Violence. Environment and Planning A 47(11): 2232 –2239.

Bhungalia, L. 2012. “Im/Mobilities in a ‘Hostile Territory’: Managing the Red Line.’” Geopolitics 17(2): 256-275.

Selected Awards

Winner of the 2024 Albert Hourani Book Award sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association

Winner of the 2024 Palestine Academic Book Award sponsored by the Middle East Monitor 

American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship 2020-21

PARC Research Fellowship, Palestinian American Research Center and Council of American Overseas

Research Centers 2020-21

Mershon Center for International Security Studies Faculty Research Grant, Ohio State University 2015

PARC Fellowship for Dissertation Research, Palestinian American Research Center and the Council of

American Overseas Research Centers 2010-11

National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant, National Science Foundation 2008-09