Professor Nick Megoran

Mid-Career Fellow 2025-26

Dematerialising Borders: border reopenings in an age of walls and fences

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there were fewer than a dozen border walls and fences in the world; now there are nearly one hundred. Dematerialising Borders is a pioneering investigation into how the twenty-first century’s proliferation of violent and exclusionary international borders can be reversed. The aim of the project is to bring social sciences, medical sciences, and humanities into conversation by creating a new paradigm for the study of border reopenings.

More information

Blog posts

Mid-Career Fellowships Award Announcement

The latest round of Mid-Career Fellowships will provide funding for six academics allowing them time away from teaching to focus on their research.

Areas of interest

Political Geography International Relations Central Asia Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan Border Studies Geopolitics Religion War & Peace Peace and Conflict Studies Reconciliation

Cohort

MCF7

Biography

Nick Megoran is Professor of Political Geography at Newcastle University.

Nick studies the political geographies and geopolitics of post-Cold War innternational relations. Although he sometimes dabbles in the Danish/German borderlands and the Middle East, most of his work is on two broad topics:

The first is the building of nation-states in modern Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, with particular attention paid to border regions, boundary disputes and geopolitics.

The second is the place of religion and the church in war and peace. Nick explores the political significance of how certain events and people - the Crusades, the World War I Christmas Truces, Rev Martin Luther King's life and work, and the September 2001 attacks in the USA - are remembered, and the implications of this remembering or forgetting for either perpetuating conflict or effecting reconciliation.

Biographical details correct as of 18.09.24