Yair Wallach

Yair Wallach is a historian, researcher and writer. Originally from Jerusalem, he has lived in London since 2003.  His academic work centers on everyday manifestations of the contested nature of modernity in Israel/Palestine. Yair's PhD (Birkbeck, 2008) examined Arabic and Hebrew "urban texts" - graffiti, street signs and stone inscriptions - in modern Jerusalem 1858-1948.  His screenplay, "Station", on the late-Ottoman railway station of Jerusalem, won an honourable mention in the MIT 2008 Just Jerusalem competition. He is currently a research associate at the University of Cambridge, in the ESRC research programme "Conflict in Cities", where he studies the possibilities and meanings of "shared space" in Jerusalem and other contested cities.