Centre membership includes staff, doctoral students and Honorary Research Associates from departments across Royal Holloway University of London, as well as a series of affiliate members who lead GeoHumanities work around the world within and beyond academia.
People
Directors
Felix Driver - Current Director
Text: Felix Driver is an historical geographer specialising in collections-based and engaged research in the arts and humanities, including projects in partnership with botanic gardens, museums and visual artists.
Harriet Hawkins – Previous Director
Harriet is interested in the geographies of art works and art worlds. She works with artists to imagine and bring about new social-ecological futures.
Veronica della Dora - Previous Director
Veronica’s research spans historical and cultural geography, the history of cartography and Byzantine studies with a specific focus on sacred space and the geographical imagination.
Advisory Board
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Tim Cresswell - University of Edinburgh Tim is Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh who writes on themes of place, mobility, and poetics. He is also a poet with three published collections. |
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Stephen Daniels- University of Nottingham My interests are interdisciplinary in scope, with a home in geography as a long established and fertile field of knowledge, imagination, practice and public engagement. My own work, in collaborations with art historians, has addressed the making and meaning of landscape, focussing on questions of imagery and design. |
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Sarah De Leeuw- Northern Medical Program, UNBC Poet and creative non-fiction author Sarah de Leeuw has a PhD in Cultural-Historical Geography; her work as an activist, scholar, and writer focuses on marginalized northern and Indigenous geographies, health and social inequities, and colonial violence. |
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Deborah Dixon- University of Glasgow Deborah’s work is animated by an interest in the ideas, ethics, and politics of both post structural and feminist frameworks, and is grounded via an examination of the monstrous, media and the marginal often through concerns with aesthetics and creative collaborative working practices. |
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Chris Gibson- University of Wollongong Australia Chris is the Director of the UoW's Global Challenges Programme. Opening up empirical and theoretical possibilities across the culture-economy divide is his central intellectual agenda. He is interested in how forms of material cultural production are embedded geographically, performed as work, and enabled technically, in networks of social and economic agents, in places and across physical distances. |
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Tania Rossetto - University of Padova, Italy Tania is a cultural geographer with a specific interest in visual and cartographic theories and practices. Through a humanistic approach, she researches the life of maps and images in physical and imaginary spaces, with particular reference to the urban realm. |
Members
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Peter’s work explores spaces of security and mobility. Recent interests include verticality and the aerial, the materiality of air and the politics of evacuation. |
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Richard Alston’s interests focus on Roman urbanism, urban cultures, and social and cultural transformations. He also works on ideas of the Classical in the modern city. |
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Sarah's research interests include spatial approaches towards South Asia’s recent history, exploring how modes of citizenship rights worked across a particular set of national boundaries or spaces. |
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Geoff’s research explores the relationship between music and the city, above all in Latin America, in both the colonial period and the present day. |
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Daniela is interested in migrant and diaspora cinema, especially in relation to European identities; new forms of exoticism in contemporary cinema in relation to destination tourism. |
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Barbara has an academic background in Environmental Science and Bioarchaeology. Her current research interests focus on participatory action research and community engagement. Her interest in the use of participatory mapping as a tool for social change and creative forms of community campaigning is reflected in her role as a Director of LivingMaps Network. |
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Toby has devised collaborative place-based oral history projects in India, the USA, Wales and England. He has directed BA and MA programmes, created oral history trails with the Museum of London, London parks and local authorities and recently undertook 57 interviews with museum founders for the Mapping Museums project. |
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Caroline is Research Coordinator at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway. Her research applies an object-focused approach to her research into the histories and geographies of museums and their collections, and the production of scientific knowledge. |
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Emma is interested in migration, refugee-responsive theatre, indigenous performance and site-responsive remembrance, postcolonial museology and performance histories linked to human remains. |
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Ruth Cruickshank - Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures Ruth has research interests in food culture, consumption, globalization and post-war French fiction, film and thought. She is a founder member of the Global Cities and Visual Culture network. |
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Paris Chronakis - Department of History Paris Chronakis is interested in urban spaces and urban identities in the imperial and post-imperial Eastern Mediterranean and on the entangled place-making practices of refugees and minorities in Modern Greece.
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Philip's interests are in the material cultures of place and mobility. |
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Fabrizio De Donno - Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures Fabrizio is interested in the cultural history of Italian orientalism and colonialism, as well as in the contemporary literature and film on the Horn of Africa. |
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Klaus works on the imaginative and material geographies of the Polar Regions. He has published widely and worked in an official capacity for UK government and Parliament. He also writes on cinematic geopolitics. |
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Gwilym is interested in mappings and their politics, indigeneity and the use of GIS in interpretive scholarship. |
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Sasha explores creative experiments with atmosphere, the elemental, and the limits of sensing. Over the past two years she carried out site-based ethnography and collaboration with Studio Tomás Saraceno in Berlin. In a new book manuscript she is developing a notion of cosmological aesthetics: an aesthetics expressed in ecologies of practice that reach for distant, cosmic and imperceptible entities and spaces. |
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Yoav Galai - PIR Yoav is a former photojournalist and NGO project manager and current lecturer in Global Political Communication. His research focuses on narrative politics and visual politics |
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Simone Gigliotti- History and the Holocaust Research Centre Simone is interested in experiences of displacement during and after the Holocaust. She uses historical, geographical and visual sources to reconstruct embodied cartographies of survival. |
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David’s interests are focused on the histories and cultures of big cities, particularly modern London. Recent work has examined the fashion industry and suburban religious identities. |
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Helen Gilbert - Drama and Theatre Helen is interested in the theatre and performance of marginalised cultures, new materialism, indigeneity, site-specific arts and activism, and contemporary performance in the Anth. |
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Robert is interested in Joseph Conrad; literature and empire; place and space; cosmopolitanism, nationalism and transnationalism; practice-based research. |
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William Jamieson, Department of Geography William is interested in the integration of political geography and literary theory through critical creative writing practices, examining how capital reads and writes space.
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Julian's interests include the history and philosophy of music, and he works on music, aesthetics, nature and environment. |
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AM Kanngieser is a Marie Curie Research Fellow and sound artist who works with sound methods to approach the relations between people, ecosystems and environments. Their research foregrounds movements for self-determination and liberation in the face of ecocide and colonisation.
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Innes has research interests that span geography, book history, and the history of science. His work focuses particularly on the circulation and reception of knowledge. |
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James Kent - Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures James is interested in Cuban visual cultures and the representation of the city in film and photography. His practice-led photographic research focuses on Havana, Cuba. |
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Ruth is interested in mobility and locality in 19th century literature, including the idea of the ‘stage coach nation’ and novels as portable place. |
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Diego Molina – Geography Diego’s research explores the historical transformations in the relations between plants and people during the urbanisation of Andean cities. He is currently interested in the nineteenth-century flora exchange between Europe and Latin America as part of international trade expansion. |
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Oli's interests cover a range of areas of the urban humanities, especially questions of urban creativity, activism and politics. |
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Sofie is interested in the geographies of dance and bodily practice, particularly in relation to Latin America. Her work seeks to bring about collaborative dialogues that might interrogate questions of the postcolonial, the transnational, and the contemporary. |
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Helen Nicholson - Drama and Theatre Helen is interested in the spatialities of amateur theatre and in questions of place, affect and community in contemporary theatre and applied performance. |
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Sophie Nield - Drama and Theatre Sophie is interested in questions of theatricality, space and representation in political life and the law, and in the performance of ‘borders’ of various kinds. |
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Saskia Papadakis - Department of Geography Saskia has returned to RHUL as a postdoctoral researcher after completing her PhD in the Geography department in 2022. She’s interested in imperialism, identity and Englishness, and in oral history and walking as research methodologies. She is currently working on the project An Oral History of the Environmental Movement, 1970-2020. |
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Flora is a practice-based research fellow working on the ERC funded project Think Deep.
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Agostinho's research intersects with Black/feminist and postcolonial Caribbean geographies of art-making and popular performances, with specific interest in Jamaican visual cultures as different modes of identity formation which occur at several scales.
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Hannah is interested in multi-sensory approaches to domestic space. She works with architects and anthropologists to explore how ancient Roman housing was employed to construct personal and group identities. |
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Giuliana Pieri - Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures Giuliana is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to Italy and Italian Nationality, textual and visual representations of the Italian landscape and the discursive construction of Italian identity. |
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Al's research interests focus on media, communications and critical geopolitics. He has recently been developing the idea of 'creative geopolitics', in particular 'creative statecraft’. He also recently undertook a 6,000 mile expedition ‘Into No Man’s Land”. |
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Tina researches the politics of music, the anthropology of cultural encounters and arts responses to global challenges (environment, endangered languages, social justice). |
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Julie Sanders - Humanities
Julie works on the cultural geographies of early modern drama and co-edits a commissioning series for Oxford University Press on Early Modern Literary Geographies. |
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Danielle Sands - Comparative Literature Danielle’s interests include animal studies, posthumanism, representations of non-human life in C20 and C21 philosophy and literature, environmental ethics, and the Anthropocene. |
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Efi is interested in gendered notions of home, nomadism, exile and encounters in literature. She is editing a volume on the production of space in Latin literature. |
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Rachael’s interests lie at the intersections of the elemental, material and geopolitical. More specifically, she focuses on issues pertaining to depth, the subterranean, and the geographies of extreme environments. Rachael is also interested in experimental methodologies. |
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Henry's research focuses on indigenous music, music-video production, media piracy, and heritage issues in the Bolivian Andes. His background is as a performer, working widely with the Early/World Music ensemble SIRINU. |
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Shzr Ee’s interests include Sinophone musical cultures and media, cosmopolitanism, nostalgia, gender and the politics of music. She is also interested in indigeneity and Southeast Asia. |
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Varyl is a geomorphologist interested in land-art and landscape-inspired contemporary music. He is on the British Society for Geomorphology’s ‘Visualising Geomorphology Working Group’. |
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Weipin is interested in Chinese modernisation and its engagement in globalisation from the 19th century, particularly the geographies of information, including postal networks and newspapers. |
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David Natal Villazala - History My research focuses on the social and political history of late antiquity, with special attention to processes of supra-regional institution building and political fragmentation. |
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Daniel is an historian of European philosophy currently working on plant-thinking. he has recently led projects in collaboration with Kew gardens, including an AHRC network on The Philosophical Life of Plants and a British Academy Fellowship, Caring for Plants in Modern Philosophy. |
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Briony Wickes - English Briony has research interests in nineteenth-century literature, settler colonial environments, critical animal studies, energy futures,
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Katie's research interests include concerns with gender, migration, place and belonging especially in the Global South. Her recent work includes an ESRC funded network with colleagues in Social Work and Media Studies exploring unaccompanied and separated children seeking asylum. |
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Libby Worth - Drama and Theatre Libby’s research interests span dance and theatre with particular current focus on site-specific performance, transnational mobility of dances and dance scores (folk and amateur), performer training and somatic practices. |
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Sarah Wright - Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures Sarah's current work explores childhood and nation in world cinemas, considering ideas of nation, transnationalism, belonging and encounter. She is also interested ways to locate the voice in world cinemas. |
Affliate Members
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Katherine Brickell - King's College London Katherine is a gender and feminist geography scholar whose work centres on the domestic sphere and uses visual-oriented participatory research methods to understand its relationship to critical and lived matters of injustice and violence. She is currently building an agenda on feminist legal geographies.
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Thomas now returned as a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Centre for the GeoHumanities. My broader interests are digital infrastructures, advertising power, cities, and social theory (specifically, theories of pessimism and nihilism); and my PhD was an ethnography with subvertisers, those illegally intervening into urban ad spaces (e.g. graffiti scribbles, advertising takeovers, etc.).
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Frankie Kubicki - Dickens Museum Frankie is curator at the Dickens Museum. Her research interests focus on materiality, material culture and the mundane. Her PhD explored the history of plants and papermaking in the nineteenth century.
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Aya Nassar - University of Warwick I am interested in elemental geography, the materiality of cities, fragments of space and storytelling, and the architecture of the postcolony. My research focuses primarily on Cairo and, sometimes, Coventry.
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Laura Price - Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Laura is a feminist cultural geographer who is interested in the geographies of making, particularly knitting. She currently writes educational resources for GCSE and A Level Geography. |
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David is a writer and curator, formerly Keeper of Technologies and Engineering at the Science Museum, with particular interests in infrastructure networks such as traffic and time distribution. He is an Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway. |
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Cecilie Sachs-Olsen- Norwegian Institute of Urban and Regional Research at Oslo Metropolitan University Cecilie is interested in the urban humanities, and in particular how participatory art can be used as a framework to analyse, question and re-imagine urban space and politics. Her work revolves around practice-based research with her urban performance collective, zURBS. |
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Bergit Arends - Courtauld Institute As a curator, Bergit works collaboratively with visual artists in studying their formulations of environmental change through the uses of archival, fieldwork, and expeditionary methods. |
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Kim works on the 19th Century Cinchona bark collections (the source of the anti-malarial quinine) at the Economic Botany Department at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
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Postgraduate Members
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Cynthia Anyadi - Geography Cynthia’s research is focussed around the use of memorial souvenirs in the burial practices of Igbo Nigerians. Her research brings together 3D modelling and oral histories to map changing deathscapes and their material supports. |
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Eva’s interests include cultural and cosmological linguistics, embodied language evolution, sub-surface mythologies, and sea-going ways of knowing. |
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Stefano Carnelli - Geography and SMLL With a background in architecture, urbanism and sociology, Stefano’s work explores the intersection between photography, cultural geography and sacred space. |
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Hattie is interested in the ephemeral geographies of play and the insights artist’s methods of enquiry can bring to an understanding of playing and place. |
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Samuel Hertz – Geography Samuel is a researcher and sound artist interleaving sound-based methodologies for measuring and understanding climate crises in the natural sciences with a forensic approach to sound that extends into the biopolitical. He often augments this work through experiments in sound and contemporary performance practices. |
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Christina Hourigan - Geography Christina is interested in garden history and the history of science. She is researching the history, importance, and global influence of Kew's arboretum in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. |
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Madelaine Joyce – Geography Madelaine’s research interests are centred around feminist geopolitics, with a particular focus on volume, territory, non-human agency, assemblages, and resilience. Her current research uses voluminous approaches and creative methods to explore the complexities of and possibilities for the Korean Demilitarised Zone. |
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Rosie's research explores different sites by critically engaging with the health geography subdiscipline of 'therapeutic landscapes' through feminist creative methods. The project attends to the complexities of human experience and individual difference, whilst questioning traditional assumptions of 'therapeutic landscapes'.
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Gloria Lowe - Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance Gloria's work examines the socio-spatial implications of performance work delivered in domestic settings. Her research seeks to re-frame the home as a place of significant cultural and creative activity. |
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Viveca Mellegard - Geography and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Viveca's project revolves around indigo dyeing both as an embodied practice and a storehouse of indigenous knowledge and skills with the potential to transform human-nature interactions. |
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Holly Nielsen - History Holly's research explores British board games c.1860-1960. She is interested in the history of play, materiality, intergenerational familial dynamics, and understanding categories of age through play. |
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Michelle Payne – Geography and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Michelle’s work focuses on the Victorian traveller and artist Marianne North and seeks to situate North’s life, travels and (visual and written) work in their social, cultural and scientific contexts, foregrounding issues of race, empire and colonial labour. |
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Tess' work focuses on the intersection of politics, urban landscapes and attitudes towards the past. In particular, it explores the conservation and planning cultures of the Greater London Council from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. |
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Rachel’s research explores geographies of garments and making, and how these can be expressed through cartography. Her AHRC technē funded PhD employs a creative-practice led methodology and with a specific focus on London’s fashion industry. |
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I am interested in the recording of place names by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in the 19th and early 20th centuries. My work aims to investigate how the RGS tackled the problem of “orthography” and to reveal how geography and linguistics, and politics and diplomacy, shaped the way the world was brought to “order”.
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Fr David John Williams - Department of History Fr David’s research focuses on shared sacred spaces in the Byzantine Mediterranean. |
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Bethan Lloyd Worthington - Geography Bethan is an artist working with installation, ceramics and books. Her practice-based research centres on the excavation of Gully Cave in Somerset and practices of climate reconstruction. |
