Research

Research interests

Cultural Geographies of landscape, embodiment & performance.
This is my main research area. Through a sequence of 10 books, single-author journal articles, editorials and book chapters I have attempted to outline and explore a series of arguments aiming to advance landscape studies beyond the ‘ways of seeing’ paradigm dominant in cultural geography since the late 1980’s. Seeking to foreground and delineate theoretically-rich notions of materiality, embodied practice and perception, my research here considers intertwinings of self and landscape - of culture and nature more generally – through focusing upon their performance via everyday practices such as walking and visualising. I also attempt, through my writing, to explore how such practices may be creatively expressed and diagrammed. In connection with this research in 2002 I was awarded an ARHB ‘Innovations’ grant to conduct a solo walk along a 200-mile stretch of the South West Coast Path, a project which lead to a series of publications and which was supplemented by a further grant award from the University of Sheffield Social Science Division Research Fund. I have also undertaken studies of cultures of landscape, the body and the visual centred upon Glastonbury Tor in Somerset, England and Antarctica. Underpinning this work is a concern to supplement critical, interpretative and discursive readings with affectual, creative and experiential accounts of enlacings and distanciations of self and landscape. In all of these works I have been concerned with examining how distinctive affinities of self and landscape emerge and are sustained through constellations of materiality, affect, light and morphology. I understand landscape in terms of tensions - tensions between, for example, watcher and watched, interior and exterior, the invisible and the visible. Thought this way, the term landscape names neither an external surface nor a set of cultural meanings, but rather the materialities and sensibilities with which we see.

Spatial Theory & Philosophy
Theory production and innovation in human geography is a longstanding research focus and interest. I am particularly interested in continental philosophy, and in the relationships between phenomenology and post-structuralism, for example the linkages and ruptures between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida. A specific concern here is understandings of landscape, place, subjectivity and embodiment in these writers. This links my research to the ongoing development of non-representational, performative and affectual approaches in human geography. My work here involves ongoing conversations and collaborations with colleagues Mitch Rose (Hull), Paul Harrison (Durham) Ben Anderson (Durham) and J-D Dewsbury (Bristol), and has resulted in 2 editorials and leading journal special issues and a number of international conference sessions/presentations.

Cultures of Travel & Exploration
My work in this area considers both literary and actual processes of travel and exploration in the broad context of European colonialism and imperialism, and its associated geographical imaginations and practices. My writing in this area has sought to both abet and inflect postcolonial geographies, by attempting to situate their critical account of colonial discourse within contexts of material performance. I have published 5 papers and book chapters on the ambivalent geographies of The Tempest, and the South Polar expeditions of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott.

Spectral Geographies
If space is associated with absence and place with presence, (despite all attempts by geographers and others to think these terms otherwise), then landscape sits precisely on this threshold: presence/absence.In the past two years, much of my writing and thinking has been about presence and absence, focusing in particular upon the configuration and unsettling of senses of landscape and self via processes of haunting. Funded by an AHRC Research Grant (£72K, Dec 2005, project runs March 06 - Sept 09) the focus here is upon the production of a series of discursive and substantive studies of the spectral as a means of re-conceptualising landscape and self. This research is inspired firstly by Jacques Derrida’s ‘hauntological’ writings on self, mourning and testimony, and secondly by the work of the German-born author W.G. Sebald.

Research projects

Grants and Awards:

• 2007 - 2010
  AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award,
  'Land and Sea: the visual geographies of the South West Coast Path,
  £50K
• 2006 - 2009
  AHRC Research Grant,
  ‘Spectral Geographies: unsettling landscape place and self’. PI
  £72K.
• 2005
  University of Sheffield Divisional Research Fund
  ‘Smoothlands: fragmenting self and landscape
  £750 (a follow-up to my South West Coast Path work)
• 2002-2004
  AHRB Innovations Award
  ‘Enacting Landscape: walking the South West Coast Path’ PI
  £5000
• 1996-1999
  ESRC PhD award:
  ‘Cultures of Landscape and the Body’

Publications

Key publications | Publications by category | Publications by year

Refresh publications

External Engagement and Impact

Committee/panel activities

Member of European Landscape Forum

Expert Panel member ERSC’s International Benchmarking Review of Human Geography

Member of AHRC Peer Review College

Teaching

2015-16 Undergraduate modules:

• GEO3121 Cultural Geographies of Landscape (Convenor)
• GEO2325 Research Methods in Human Geography
• GEO2308 Berlin Fieldtrip

2015-16 Postgraduate modules:

• GEOM131 Geographies of Culture, Creativity and Practice

Current PhD students:

• Veronica Vickery (Joint Supervisor, AHRC Award)
• Dominic Walker (Second Supervisor, University of Exeter Scholarship)
• Dalia Kuoraite (Lead Supervisor, self-funded)
• Patrick Weir (Second Supervisor, AHRC Award)

Alumni

• Katherine Morton (completed Sept 2014) AHRC Award, Second Supervisor - now University of Bristol
• Deborah Knight (completed Dec 2012) AHRC Award, Joint Supervisor
• James Riding (completed June 2012) University of Exeter Scholarship, First Supervisor - now University of Sheffield
• Leila Dawney (completed March 2011) AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, First Supervisor - now University of Brighton
• Liz Roberts (completed Sept 2010) AHRC Project Student, First Supervisor - now University of the West of England
• Jenny Carton (Mphil completed 2009) ESRC Award, Joint Supervisor.
• Erena le Heron (completed Jan 2008) TEC New Zealand, Joint Supervisor
• Louisa Cadman (completed Dec 2005) ESRC Award ‘Second Supervisor

Modules

2019/20

• GEO1316 - Concepts in Geography
• GEO3121 - Cultural Geographies of Landscape

Supervision / Group

Postgraduate researchers