Dr Hashem Abushama

I am a human geographer with interests in urban studies, cultural studies, critical development studies, and postcolonial geographies. I am responsible for human geography teaching at St John’s. I am also a lecturer at the School of Geography and the Environment, where I teach on a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. My PhD is from the University of Oxford.

Teaching

I teach on a number of Prelims and FHS courses for Geography. I also supervise master's dissertations. I consider myself to be primarily a teacher and seek much joy from this part of the job.

My training in geography is highly interdisciplinary and engages with debates in urban geography, settler colonial and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and development geographies. I have three developing research projects. The first is my monograph Cities and the Settler Colony: Accumulation, Dispossession, and Arts, which examines Palestinian cultural productions in Haifa (Israel) and Ramallah (occupied territories). The monograph takes the cities as two connected yet distinctly different sites in the production of global capitalism and settler colonialism. The second project, which is funded through a three-year summer Postdoctoral EUME Fellowship at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, examines the constitutive, spatial role of Dada co-founder Marcel Janco in the burial of Palestinian villages in relation to Dada’s earlier, ambivalent dependency on colonialism and its theft of artworks. The third is in the early stages and focuses on everyday processes of cultural production as entry points into examining the Arab Gulf’s rising cultural hegemony.

I also have an enthusiastic interest in food as a practice and archive and work closely with the Kitchen Marronage collective as a chef-in-residence, curating recipes, food seminars, and collaborations.

Recent Publications

Book manuscript
Cities and the Settler Colony: Accumulation, Dispossession, and Arts (in preparation, 2025)

Peer-reviewed articles

Abushama, H. and Goffe, Tao Leigh et al (2022). 'The World We Became: Map Quest 2350, A Speculative Atlas Beyond Climate Crisis', Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 7, no. 1–2: 5–49. DOI: 10.1163/23523085-07010002

Abushama, H. (2021). 'On Refugee Agency, Bio-Politics, and a New World', Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 37(2), 30–37. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.40794

Abushama, H (2020). 'Politics of Portraiture: the Studio of the Kirkorians', Jerusalem Quarterly, 81, Spring 2020. Winner of Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Outstanding Essay on Jerusalem

Public scholarship
Abushama, H. (2023). 'Why does Europe selectively remember its victims?', Palestine Square

Abushama, H. (2022). ‘According to Whose Archives?: The Tantura Massacre and Revisionist Israeli Historiography', Institute for Palestine Studies, Palestine Square

Awards and Distinctions

Best PhD Dissertation in British Middle East Studies, BRISMES (Runner up) 2023
Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Outstanding Essay on Jerusalem 2020
Lewis Hoskins Peacebuilding Award, Earlham College, the United States 2015