This semester, our department welcomes new faculty member Professor Lisa Bhungalia. We recently spoke with Professor Bhungalia about her research, her inspiration, and more!

Tell us about how you got to where you are in the department/ field of geography today?
My path to this role began many years ago. My interest in geography was sparked almost two decades ago when I landed in the West Bank as the separation wall was being constructed and saw firsthand how the wall transformed and decimated the city in which I was residing in a relatively short period of time. I returned to the US and wrote my master’s thesis on urbicide – or the killing of city space through architecture. From there on out I was a geographer. I went on to complete my PhD in Geography at Syracuse University and then a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University before starting a faculty position in the Department of Geography at Kent State University. My research broadly focuses on the intersection of late-modern war, law, and empire with a focus on transnational linkages between the US and Southwest Asian and North African regions. My first book, Elastic Empire, published by Stanford University Press in December 2023 deploys a topological analysis to contemporary imperial formations, tracing how US counterterrorism laws and sanctions regimes are bundled and embed into US aid flows inbound to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This, transporting in turn, Washington’s counterterrorism regime into the intimate spaces of Palestinian everyday life through the relations of aid on which they are largely reliant. I call this the elastic workings of sovereignty. I am also developing new research on the social lives of terrorism databases. I am thrilled to be a part of the Department of Geography and International Studies at UW-Madison and the rich geographical tradition of which it is a part.
What projects or research are you working on?
My next project extends my research on extraterritorial sovereignties and global security regimes through a transnational study of contemporary sanctions and security watchlists as these operate in the banking and financial sectors. A multi-sited ethnographic study that traverses the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, it traces how sanctions and blacklisting practices travel and embed in global financial circuits, banking systems, and payment infrastructures infusing state security regimes into financial circuits that transit the globe.
What classes are you teaching?
I am currently teaching a new course, Global Middle East, which examines the multi-scalar historical and contemporary forces and dynamics that have produced and continue to shape the Middle East and the politics of knowledge surrounding it. I have loved teaching this course and plan to teach it again in the future, especially in light of current developments and devastation in the region. This coming spring, I am teaching a new graduate seminar, Political Geographies of Empire, and an undergraduate course, Global In/Security. Both of these courses are cross-listed in Geography, International Studies, and Middle East Studies.
What fellow geographers do you draw your inspiration/motivation from?
I have been most influenced by critical human geographers and especially political, feminist, Indigenous and queer geographic traditions. It is difficult to delineate exactly who has been most influential to my thinking as I see my influences as coming from a collection of interactions and influences across disciplinary divides over the course of many years. That said, Laleh Khalili, though not technically a geographer but very much versed in critical human geography, has been profoundly influential to my thinking around the evolving modalities of late-modern war and counterinsurgency, as have Mat Coleman and Alison Mountz for their scholarship on the refashioning of state and sovereignty regimes as states bend and flex across extraterritorial domains. Eyal Weizman (though technically an architect) and Omar Jabary-Salamanca have too deeply influenced my thinking on how regimes of violence are exercised through humanitarian interventions, technologies, and practices. I have also been particularly influenced by anthropologists studying empire ethnographically particularly from the global south, such as Madiha Tahir, Samar Al-Bulushi, and Darryl Li. This collection of scholars is part of a growing body of scholarship, what we might call “empire studies from below” which has been deeply influential to my thinking and research.
What excites you most about joining UW-Madison and our Geography department?
From the first time I visited the department it felt like a natural fit. From the outset, I was particularly excited about the rich and expansive research being done in critical human geography and the broad range of courses offered here, in addition to the global and interdisciplinary focus of the department. I also deeply value that language acquisition is valued in the department. Additionally, I have found considerable overlap with the questions and projects graduate and undergraduate students in the department are undertaking and my own research interests, particularly around questions of sovereignty, empire, war, violence, and decoloniality. This has been particularly exciting. I look forward to future collaborations with faculty and grads alike and to developing new courses in alignment with student interest at the graduate and undergraduate levels.