Education
Ph.D. Geography, Syracuse University
M.A. Humanities and Social Thought, New York University
B.A. English, Ohio State University
Interests
Sovereignty, War, Violence, Law, Race, Critical Theory, Decoloniality, Southwest Asia and North Africa
Research Areas
Broadly my research explores the intersections of late-modern war, law, empire, and transnational linkages between the US and Southwest Asian and North African region. My 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. I am also developing new research on the social lives of terrorism databases.
Current Research
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.
Affiliations
Middle East Studies Program
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
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)