Dr Alan Ingram

Alan Ingram was educated at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a BA (1993) and PhD (1998) in Geography. He was a Research Associate of the Post-Soviet States in Transition Programme at the University of Cambridge from 1998 and 1999, and taught at the LSE from 1998 to 1999 and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge from 1999 to 2001. He joined UCL in 2004 after working outside academia in the field of global health policy.

Ingram's research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy. He has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals including Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers, Political Geography, Geopolitics, Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Security Dialogue. In 2009 he published Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror, co-edited with Klaus Dodds. In 2011 he was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship and in 2013 curated the exhibition Geographies of War: Iraq Revisited supported by a UCL Beacon Bursary for Public Engagement. His 2019 book Geopolitics and the Event: Rethinking Britain's Iraq War Through Art was published in the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers Book Series.

Ingram's career has also been distinguished by his support for postgraduate research and early career scholars. As Secretary of the Political Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society from 2008 to 2011 he helped to initiate biennial research group workshops fostering early career scholarship and having served as Department Graduate Tutor at UCL Department of Geography from 2013 to 2016, he was appointed in 2020 as Vice Dean for Postgraduate Research and Faculty Graduate Tutor in Social and Historical Sciences.

Alan Ingram's research examines the ways in which geopolitical events are constituted and contested as matters of public and political concern. His work explores how diverse actors frame and enact geopolitical events within particular political, aesthetic and material practices and considers their wider implications.

Ingram’s research has focused on three major events and divergent responses to them. His early career work examined how, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian nationalists and geopolitical theorists pursued the idea that Russia was a divided nation involved an existential struggle with the West in ways that helped to set the stage for future tensions and conflicts. His second main research project explored the geopolitical and security implications of emerging infectious diseases, focusing on the contrasting ways in which activists and policy makers in Britain and the US framed the HIV/AIDS pandemic as an exceptional event requiring exceptional responses and assessing the consequences of these framings for domestic and global health politics. More recently, his research has examined how artists, curators and activists have reframed Britain’s role in the 2003 Iraq war, highlighting the ways in which their work has formed critical and creative counterpoints to official accounts, inquiries and memorials and opened up new ways of engaging with this event. Drawing on this research, his 2019 book Geopolitics and the Event: Rethinking Britain’s Iraq War Through Art maps out new ways of thinking about geopolitics, art and events in relation to each other.

Ingram's current research extends his interest in how knowledge about geopolitical events is constituted and contested via public practices, with particular reference to relations between Russia and Britain and wider concerns about the politics of truth and the fate of the West.

Reading Alan Ingram's Geopolitics and the Event: Rethinking Britain's Iraq War Through Art, forthcoming Review Forum in Political Geography

Ingram A (2021) Outbreak, epidemic, pandemic: the politics of global health events. A review of Sara E. Davies' Containing Contagion Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 42:2 350-352

Ingram A (2019) Thinking security through the event: materiality, politics and publicity in the Litvinenko affair Security Dialogue 50:2 165-180

Ingram A (2019) Geopolitics and the Event: Rethinking Britain's Iraq War through Art Oxford: Wiley RGS-IBG Book Series

Steinberg P Page S Dittmer J Gökariksel B Smith S Ingram A Koch N (2018) Reassessing the Trump Presidency, one year on Political Geography 62: 207-215

Ingram A (2018) Critical approaches to global health. In McInnes C Lee K Youde J eds The Oxford Handbook of Global Health Politics Oxford: Oxford University Press DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190456818.013.5.

Ingram A (2017) Art, geopolitics and metapolitics at Tate Galleries London Geopolitics 22:3 719-739

Ingram A (2017) Geopolitical events and fascist machines: Trump, Brexit and the deterritorialisation of the West Political Geography 57: 91-93

Ingram A Forsyth I Gauld N (2016) Beyond geopower: earthly and anthropic geopolitics in The Great Game by War Boutique Cultural Geographies 23:4 635-652

Ingram A (2016) Rethinking art and geopolitics through aesthetics: artist responses to the Iraq war Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41:1 1-13

Ingram A (2013) Viral geopolitics: biosecurity and global health governance in Dobson A Barker K Taylor S eds Biosecurity: The Socio-Politics of Invasive Species and Infectious Diseases. London: Earthscan/Routledge.

Ingram A (2013) After the exception: HIV/AIDS beyond salvation and scarcity Antipode 45:2 436-454

Ingram A (2013) Artists in Dodds K Kuus M Sharp J Critical Geopolitics Research Companion Farnham: Ashgate

Ingram A (2013) Global vision, ground truth? A Short Film About War as experimental geopolitics (catalogue essay in E Coomasaru ed. Thomson & Craighead: A Short Film About War) link to catalogue

Ingram A (2013) 'Official war artists' and the cultural and political geographies of conflict (catalogue essay for Caught in the Crossfire: Artistic Responses to Conflict, Peace and Reconciliation at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry) link to catalogue

Ingram A (2012) Art and the Iraq war: visibility, materiality and the politics of space (catalogue essay for Iraq: How, Where, for Whom: Hanaa Malallah and kennardphillipps at the Mosaic Rooms, London) link to exhibition page

Ingram A (2012) Bringing war home: from Baghdad, 5 March 2007 to London, 9 September 2010 Political Geography 31:2 61-63

Ingram A (2012) Experimental geopolitics: Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension Geographical Journal 178:2 123-133

Brown T Craddock S Ingram A (2012) Critical interventions in global health: governmentality, risk, assemblage Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102:5 1182-1189

Ingram A (2011) The Pentagon's HIV/AIDS programmes: governmentality, political economy, security Geopolitics 16:3 655-674

Ingram A (2011) Making geopolitics otherwise: artistic interventions in global political space Geographical Journal 177:3 218-222

Ingram A (2010) Biosecurity and the international response to HIV/AIDS Area 42:3 293-301

Ingram A (2010) Refamiliarizing the war on terror in Kluijver R ed Borders: Contemporary Middle Eastern Art and Discourse The Hague: Gemak 41

Ingram A (2010) Governmentality and security in the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) Geoforum 41:4 607-616

Ingram A (2009) The geopolitics of disease Geography Compass 3:6 2084-2097

Ingram A and Dodds K eds (2009) Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror Farnham: Ashgate

Ingram A (2009) Art and the geopolitical: remapping security at Green Zone/Red Zone in Ingram A Dodds K Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror Farnham: Ashgate 257-277

Ingram A (2009) The international political economy of global responses to HIV/AIDS in Kay A Williams O eds The Crisis of Global Health Governance: Challenges: Institutions and Political Economy Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan

Ingram A (2008) Domopolitics and disease: HIV/AIDS, immigration and asylum in the UK Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26:5 875-894

Ingram A (2008) Pandemic anxiety and global health security in Pain R Smith S eds Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life Aldershot: Ashgate 75-85

Ingram A (2007) HIV/AIDS, security and the geopolitics of US-Nigerian relations Review of International Political Economy 14:3 510-534

Lee K Ingram A Lock K McInnes C (2007) Bridging health and foreign policy: the role of health impact assessments Bulletin of the World Health Organisation 85:3 207-2011

Coker R Ingram A (2006) Passports and pestilence: migration, security and contemporary border control of infectious diseases in Bashford A ed Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present London: Palgrave 159-176

Ingram A (2005) The new geopolitics of disease: between global health and global security Geopolitics 10:3 522-545

Ingram A (2005) Global leadership and global health: contending meta-narratives, divergent responses, fatal consequences International Relations 19:4 381-402

Zwi A Owen JW Ingram A (2004) Health and foreign policy: moving forward with greater focus Medical Journal of Australia 180:4 152-153

Ingram A (2001) Alexander Dugin: geopolitics and neo-fascism in post-Soviet Russia Political Geography 20:8 1029-1051. Translated into Russian by Anton Shekhovtsov as Алан Ингрэм (2011) Александр Дугин: геополитика и неофашизм в постсоветской России Форум новейшей восточноевропейской истории и культуры 2-С: 7-33

Ingram A (2001) Broadening Russia's borders? The nationalist challenge of the Congress of Russian Communities Political Geography 20:2 197-219

Ingram A (1999) 'A nation split into fragments': the Congress of Russian Communities and Russian nationalist ideology Europe-Asia Studies 51:4 687-704

In March 2013 Ingram curated the exhibition Geographies of War: Iraq Revisited, which explored how artists from Iraq and Britain responded to the war by engaging with questions of space, place, landscape, home and territory. The exhibition was accompanied by artists' talks and public engagement workshops exploring different experiences of the war and responses to it, organised in collaboration with the Mosaic Rooms, Ark Artist Space and Reel Festivals and supported by a UCL Public Engagement Beacon Bursary. The exhibition was reviewed in Trebuchet Magazine. In the period surrounding tenth anniversary of the invasion Ingram contributed to public panels discussing art and culture in relation to the war (Reel Iraq 2013). Further public events included a 2014 panel on Threads of Light/Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here at the Mosaic Rooms and an evening of Iraqi poetry and theatre at UCL as part of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition, also in 2014.

GEOG0015 Global Events

GEOG0025 Political Geography and Geopolitics

GEOG0056 Geopolitical Events

GEOGG086 Advanced Geopolitics

Current

Catriona Gold. "Don't be an 'Ugly American'": the US Passport Office and Cold War government of travel, 1955-77. Funded by ESRC 1+3 studentship.

Martina Fisk. The Geo-politics of Carbon Accounting. Funded by ESRC +3 studentship.

Completed

Lioba Hirsch. Quarantine: lived experiences of disease, spatial exclusion and embodiment in West Africa. Funded by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung PhD Scholarship and a UCL Graduate Research Scholarship for Cross-Disciplinary Training. PhD awarded 2020.

Charlotte Whelan. Experimental art practices and alternative political spaces in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Funded by ESRC +3 studentship. PhD awarded 2017.

Ophélie Véron. Deconstructing the divided city: identity, power and space in Skopje. Co-supervision with Dr Ger Duijzings, SEES. PhD awarded 2015.

Sam Halvorsen. Subverting space: territorial practices and territoriality in the Occupy London movement. Funded by ESRC +3 studentship. PhD awarded 2015.

Cinzia Polese. Negotiating power between civil society and the state: the formulation of asylum policies in Italy and the United Kingdom. Funded by ESRC studentship. PhD awarded 2013.

Nick Megoran. The Borders of Eternal Friendship? The politics and pain of nationalism and identity along the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary 1999-2000. Funded by ESRC studentship. PhD awarded 2002.