School of Life Sciences & the Environment
Klaus Dodds joined Royal Holloway, University of London in 1994, and was previously a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD in geopolitics at the University of Bristol with time spent at the Inter-American Defence College and the National Defence University in Washington DC.
Before becoming Executive Dean of the School of Life Sciences and Environment, he was Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange for the School and a former Dean of the Graduate School and Director of the Leverhulme Magna Carta Doctoral Centre. He is currently co-director of the Living Sustainably catalyst. He has examined over 50 PhD theses and acted as external examiner to programmes at the Cambridge University, UCL, Birkbeck College London, and University College Dublin.
While at Royal Holloway, Klaus has held a variety of external roles and positions, including visiting fellowships at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), Loughborough University, and separately at St Cross and St Johns Colleges, University of Oxford. Outside of academia, he served as a specialist adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Arctic and the Environmental Audit Committee for the House of Commons. He has worked for multiple UK government departments as an expert advisor on polar governance, post-COVID futures and global strategic trends, as well as worked for NATO’s Strategic Foresight. He is an Honorary Fellow of British Antarctic Survey and continues to serve as a UK representative for the International Arctic Science Committee.
Klaus is a previous winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2005) and elected to the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences in 2012. He is a trustee of the Regional Studies Association and Editor in Chief of Territory Politics Governance. His own research interests include geopolitics, polar and ocean governance, climate change, health and planetary sustainability. His latest books include Border Wars (Penguin 2021) and a co-edited Ice Humanities (Manchester University Press 2022).
