About me
I'm Professor of GeoHumanities, and the founding Co-Director of the Centre for GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London (with Professor Veronica Della Dora FBA).
My research is focused on the advancement of the GeoHumanities, a field that sits at the intersection of geographical scholarship with arts and humanities scholarship and practice. Empirically, I explore the geographies of artworks and art worlds. I'm interested in the elaboration of core humanities concepts of aesthetics, creativity and the imagination from a geographical perspective. My current research focuses on the underground as a site of much needed new environmental imaginations.
Collaboration underpins my research practice and alongside written research, I've produced artist’s books, participatory art projects and exhibitions with individual artists and a range of international arts organizations including Tate, Arts Catalyst, Iniva, Furtherfield and Swiss Artists in Labs.
I'm the author of For Creative Geographies (2013) and Creativity (2016), co-editor of Geographical Aesthetics (2014) and Geographies of Making Craft and Creativity (2017). My latest monograph exploring practice-based research, Geography, Art, Research: Artistic Research in the GeoHumanities was published in 2020. In addition, I've written over 80 peer-reviewed publications.
My research and collaborations are funded by a range of bodies including the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), The Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, the Arts Council, and the National Science Foundations of the US, Switzerland and China.
I've been privileged to give over 60 invited lectures, keynotes and plenaries in 16 different countries. I've also examined 31 doctoral theses in nine countries. In 2016, I was delighted to be awarded the Royal Geographical Gill Memorial Award, the Phillip Leverhulme Prize and an AHRC Leadership Fellowship.
This was followed, in 2020, by the award of a €1.95 million five-year European Research Council Consolidator Grant, as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, for my project THINK DEEP: Novel Creative Approaches to the Underground.
I serve as the Director of the Technē AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership which awards 60 doctoral studentships per year, across nine academic institutions. I’m a Panel Chair for the UK Research & Innovation Future Leader Fellowships Peer Review College and was the Chair of the Royal Geographical Society Social & Cultural Geography Research Group until 2019. I'm also a member of the Geography and Environmental Studies expert sub-panel for the 2021 UK Research Excellence Framework assessment.
I’m also Managing Editor of the journal Cultural Geographies, and Associate Editor of GeoHumanities. I've also served as external examiner - previously for the School of Geography at University College Dublin, and currently for the School of Geography at Maynooth University.
I was educated at Wellington School, Somerset and the University of Nottingham, UK (BA Geography, MA Landscape & Culture, PhD). My doctoral thesis was titled, Geographies of art and rubbish: an approach to the work of Richard Wentworth, Tomoko Takahashi and Michael Landy and was supervised by Professor Stephen Daniels FBA FAcSS FSA.