Jessica Jacobs

Jessica Jacobs is a cultural geographer currently based at Royal Holloway University of London. Her research interests focus on tourist-local encounters in the tourist spaces of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. In 2005/6 she was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant to produce a film and teaching text about Western imaginaries of the desert/nomad in the Sinai tourist industry. The resulting film Sinai Sun: Traditional Tourists and Modern Bedouin was selected for the (2007) Margaret Mead Travelling Film and Video Festival. She has gone on to develop a range of innovative approaches to the use of film as a research method and output in her latest (three-year) research project 'Rebranding the Levant: Contested heritage and colonial modernities in Amman and Damascus funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.