Leadership Team
Professor Nicola Thomas
Head of Department
Nicola is a Professor of Historical and Cultural Geography, focusing on craft geographies. Nicola explores the intersection of material, historical, cultural, social, political and economic contexts of craft makers livelihoods and that of their labour.
Maria Pearce
Sean Carter
Deputy Head of Geography
Sean teaches and researches in the broad field of Political Geography, with specific interests in the intersection between culture and geopolitics.
Professor Gail Davies
Co-Director of Research and Impact
Gail's research is situated at the interface between human geography, science and technology studies, and animal studies. Her work focuses on the spaces of science and technology, human and animal health, and research involvement and responsibility.
Dr Matt Finn
Director of Education and Student Experience
Matt is a senior lecturer and human geographer, exploring changes in the contemporary conditions of education, and works to understand how childhood and young people's lives vary globally. In this he brings the scholarship of geographical learning and education which is informed by a participatory action research ethos.
Prof Alasdair Jones
Director of Postgraduate Taught
Alasdair is an interdisciplinary social scientist with expertise in urban studies and programme evaluation. His research is committed to developing empirical approaches that insights the critical questions concerning urban planning, public spaces, and policy programmes.
Dr Anne Le Brocq
Deputy Director of Education and Student Experience
Anne has a background in glaciology, with particular reference to Antarctica. In the past she has published papers including ice sheet modelling, ice sheet subglacial hydrology and Remote Sensing & GIS applications in glaciology. She is now focussing on the use of game-based and playful learning in teaching and outreach.
Dr Cordelia Freeman
Co-Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Cordelia is a political geographer researching borders, mobility and violence, specifically in Latin America. Her work focuses on abortion mobilities in Latin America, the politics of representation, and borders and geopolitics
Professor Karen Bickerstaff
Co-Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
I am an environmental geographer interested in i) the place-based dimensions of living with techno-environmental risks, ii) geographies and temporalities of environmental injustice, and iii) social change and collaborative and practice.
Dr Sam Kinsley
Director of Business Engagement and Impact
Sam is a leading scholar of digital geographies with a particular interest in automation and the future. Sam's research principally concerns how technologies are governed and imagined and what this tells us about how we experience and imagine society and space.
Professor Rolf Aalto
Director of Global Engagement
Rolf researches rivers and erosion in Australasia, Europe, Asia, South and North America. He leads the Radiometry Lab, which features analytical facilities for tracing particle movement throughout a wide range of fluvial dispersal systems.
