The Place that is Ours: Maps of Palestine-Israel is an ongoing project developed during a summer fellowship at the Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School in 2017. By using primary sources from the Harvard Map Collection, the project seeks to visualise how the land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea has been imagined, mapped and curated since the early twentieth century.

The Palestine-Israel conflict is one predicated on land: who controls it, what they do with it, if they have a right to it etc. The Place that is Ours seeks to demonstrates the fractured cartography of the region: from place names, to border delineations. It incorporates different media such as historical and GIS maps, written text, photography and film. Inspired by the discovery of my father’s two lost villages through the use of interactive maps, The Place that is Ours demonstrates many of the ways we have (re)imagined and (re)drawn the land over the past 100 years, culminating (or perhaps beginning) with the partition of Palestine in 1948.

The project has been presented at Dartmouth University, Harvard University and the Boston Atheneum. To arrange a talk, please use the contact page.