Staff Profile

Background

My main interests lie in the meeting points between politics, space and matter. Past and present research include the militarisation of natural resources in contested territories in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The infrastructure of faith and religion in conflicted urban environments and the emergence of new separation regimes in cities today.

Before taking a position at Newcastle, I was a research and teaching associate at SOAS (2017-2021), UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies (2016), and the Development Planning Unit (2017- 2018).

Past, current and future projects

My research approach involves designing interdisciplinary working environments that integrate multiple exploratory methods from the fields of IR, political geography, culture studies and public policy.

My first project comparatively examined the securitisation processes of contested territories and focused on the Golan Heights and Northern Cyprus. Several of my publications are based on these projects. The first explores the political formation of the Golan Heights as a tourist resort (Ram, 2014); the subsequent two develop a comparative model to study the securitisation processes of contested territories by juxtaposing the Golan Heights to Northern Cyprus (Ram, 2015) and the West Bank (Gordon and Ram, 2016).

Upon completion of my thesis in 2014, I examined the relations between urban politics and practices of faith in Israel-Palestine, utilising ethnographic work with geographic analysis. I have written three articles discussing how places of worship are shaped as ethnonational strongholds in the city (Ram and Aharon Gutman 2017), examine how religion constructs urban-national identity (Aharon Gutman and Ram, 2018) and engage with the methodology of rhythm analysis and its application to the study of national conflicts in contested cities (Ram and Aharon Gutman, 2019).

In 2016, I received a Wellcome Trust Seed grant that enabled me to take part in a research project at UCL’s Development Planning Unit (DPU) exploring the international relations of development health and focusing on the export of medical knowledge, personnel and infrastructure from Israel to Africa. An article exploring the geopolitics of health and medical assistance that was based on this research was published in the British Journal of Middle East Studies (Ram and Yacobi, 2023). The project examined how medical experience shapes development aid, international politics, immigration processes and racialisation dynamics in Africa and the Middle East. 

Between 2020 and 2023, I led a research group which was awarded a grant by the Gerda Henkel Foundation to study the link between destruction and renewal by framing ruins as multi-dimensional public, social, and cultural problems and tracing the urban histories of ruination and recovery in the Middle East. As part of this research project, I have published on the temporal regimes of ruination in Palestine/Israel (Ram and Monterescu, 2023; Handel, Ram, Mustafa and Monterescu, 2024). 

In addition to these works, I have written on collective memory and Trauma (Yacobi and Ram, 2012), settler-native relations (Ram and LeVine, 2012) and the figure of the undead in popular culture (Ram, 2016).  

Undergraduate studies

Degree Programme Director (DPD): L200 Politics BA Honours

Module leader: POL 3127: Global Apartheid Regimes

Postgraduate studies

Module leader: POL 8044: Critical Geopolitics

• Articles

  • Handel A, Ram M, Mustafa H, Monterescu D. The politics of time: Political entropy, settler colonialism and urban ruination in Hebron / Al-Khalil, Palestine. Political Geography 2024, 111, 103093.
  • Ram M, Yacobi H. Zionism in a white coat: Israel’s geopolitics of medical aid development assistance of health to Africa. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 2023, 50(4), 825-844.
  • Ram M, Aharon-Gutman M. Sacred Rhythms and Political Frequencies: Reading Lefebvre in an Urban House of Prayer. City & Society 2019, 31(2), 251-274.
  • Aharon-Gutman M, Ram M. Objective possibility as urban possibility: reading Max Weber in the city. Journal of Urban Design 2018, 23(6), 803-822.
  • Ram M, Aharon-Gutman M. Strongholding the Synagogue to Stronghold the City: Urban‐Religious Configurations in an Israeli Mixed‐City. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 2017, 108(5), 641-655.
  • Gordon N, Ram M. Ethnic cleansing and the formation of settler colonial geographies. Political Geography 2016, 53, 20-29.
  • Ram M. Colonial conquests and the politics of normalization: The case of the Golan Heights and Northern Cyprus. Political Geography 2015, 47, 21-32.
  • Ram M. White But Not Quite: Normalizing Colonial Conquests Through Spatial Mimicry. Antipode 2014, 46(3), 736-753.

• Book Chapters

  • Monterescu D, Ram M. Von verlorenen und wiedergefundenen Städten: Das soziale Leben von Ruinen in Israel/Palästina von 1882 bis zur Gegenwart. In: Martin Zimmermann, ed. Lost Cities: Vom Leben Mit Verlassenen Stadten in Den Kulturen Der Welt. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2024, pp.271-294.
  • Ram M, Yacobi H. Neo-Apartheid Jerusalem: Palestine/Israel and the Question of Urban Apartheid. In: Mark Griffiths and Miko Joronen, ed. Encountering Palestine Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2023, pp.149-176.
  • Ram, M. Fictionalizing the Failure of Science – Zombies, Ambivalence and Modernity. In: Shawn Edrei and Danielle Gurevitch, ed. Science Fiction: Beyond Borders. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, pp.45-63.
  • Ram, M, LeVine, M. The Village Against the Settlement: Two Generations of Conflict in the Nablus Region. In: Mark Levine, Gershon Shafir, ed. Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel. California: University of California Press, 2012, pp.318-337.
  • Ram, M, Yacobi, H. African Asylum Seekers and the Changing Politics of Memory in Israel. In: Irial Glynn, J. Olaf Kleist, ed. History, Memory and Migration. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.