I was born in Kent, England – actually on the borders between Kent and London – on 1 March 1951.  I went to the local grammar school, Chislehurst & Sidcup Grammar School for Boys, and won an Open Exhibition in Geography to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (and subsequently a Scholarship).
 
At Cambridge, I was taught by (among others) Richard Chorley, Alan Baker, Harold Fox, Jack Langton, Brian Robson and David Stoddart.  I graduated with a double starred First in Geography in 1972, and in 1973 I was appointed as a University Assistant Lecturer in Geography and elected Fellow of Sidney Sussex College.  At the time of my appointment I was toying with the idea of drama school – but decided to take the job for a year or two because I thought it would be just like acting, except that I could write my own scripts and, even better, mark the audience.  And it was at Cambridge I discovered the central importance – and extraordinary enjoyment – of teaching.
 
I remained at Cambridge until my appointment as Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver in 1989.
 
My work has been distinguished by a focus on processes of historical and geographical change – on periods of crisis and transformation – and by an attention to critical theories capable of illuminating the ways in which place, space and landscape are implicated in the operation and outcome of social processes.  
 
My first book, published before I had completed my PhD thesis, was entitled Ideology, science and human geography (1978).  It was simultaneously a critique of spatial science and an ambitious agenda for the development of a critical human geography.   It was also a promissory note, which I started to redeem in my regional study of industrialization in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, in particular, the change from a domestic to a factory system in the woollen industry of the West Riding of Yorkshire.  This study, in fact my PhD thesis, was subsequently published as Regional Transformation and Industrial revolution (1982).  It was staged on the classic ground of E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, and it was inspired by Thompson’s belief in the powers of conscious, collective human agency; but it also drew attention to the structural templates of early industrial capitalism and to the new spaces through which they were put in place.  
 
That relationship between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’, influenced by the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens (who was also at Cambridge at the time), continued my interest in the connections between human geography, social theory and political economy, but it was not until I moved to UBC in 1989 that I began to address equally important questions about culture and politics. I outlined my evolving ideas in Geographical imaginations (1994).  But responding to those questions took me not only a long way from Britain but also a long way from Canada. I began to work on cultures of travel and travel-writing: on the ways in which European and American travellers to Egypt in the long nineteenth century found the terms for cultures and landscapes for which they literally had no terms.  A preliminary essay appeared in a book I edited with Jim Duncan, Writes of passage (1999).  This new phase of work owed much to Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, but it was much more concerned with the corporeality and physicality of travel – with embodied subjects moving through material landscapes – and with the constantly changing (often mislaid) cultural baggage of the travellers. And it paid attention not only to what travellers and tourists wrote, but also to what they mapped, sketched and photographed – and the consequences these representations had for their encounters.  The results of these studies will appear as Dancing on the Pyramids: Orientalism and cultures of travel (in preparation).
 
This work had the liveliest of contemporary implications, but the shocking events of 11 September 2001 prompted me to address our own present much more directly.  In the months following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I started to trace the contours of the emerging ‘war on terror’.  Drawing on both my training (and sensibility) as an historical geographer and my understanding of the continued power of Orientalism, I wrote The colonial present (2004), described by the Los Angeles Times as ‘must-read heresy’ and by David Harvey as a ‘must read for all those concerned with peace and justice in our time’.  The book recovers the long history of British and American involvements in the “Middle East”, and shows how these affected the cultural, political and military responses to 9/11. It shows how war quite literally takes place, and it describes in detail the violent ‘taking of places’ not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but in occupied Palestine too.  It is thus a study that wires together different places around the world, and shows how war connects the abstractions of geopolitics – the pronouncements of politicians, the strategies of generals – to the lives and deaths of countless thousands of ordinary men and women. It recovers popular, commonplace ‘geographical imaginations’, and shows us how little we often know about other people in other places.  And it reminds us that geography, too, has a long involvement in war: and I hope holds out the prospect of a radically different human geography.
 
I’m still determined to return to Dancing on the Pyramids (Minneapolis/University of Minnesota Press) but (as these pages show) I’m also very much occupied with the ‘war on terror’, particularly in the “Middle East”.  I’m currently completing a series of essays that draw together my recent work on the war, War cultures (New York/Routledge),  I’m also working on two short, ‘theoretical’ books, Power, knowledge and geography (Oxford/Blackwell) and Spaces (New York/Routledge), and I’m far into the research for a book on the cultural and political geographies of bombing (London/Verso, Paris/La Fabrique).
 
 
For a list of the graduate students I’ve supervised (and who have all supervised me in return), see the separate page (on Navigation bar above).
 
 
Profile
  1. •Post-secondary education:
  2.  
  3. •BA First Class (Hons) (with distinction) in Geography, University of Cambridge, 1972
  4. •MA, University of Cambridge, 1975
  5. •PhD, University of Cambridge, 1981
  6.  
  7. •Academic appointments:
  8.  
  9. •University Assistant Lecturer in Geography, University of Cambridge, UK, 1973-1978
  10. •University Lecturer in Geography, University of Cambridge, UK, 1978-1988
  11. •Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and Director of Studies in Geography, 1973-1988
  12. •Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia, 1989-
  13.  
  14. •Recent books:
  15.  
  16. •The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (2004)
  17. •David Harvey: a critical reader (edited with Noel Castree) (2006)
  18. •Violent geographies: fear, terror and political violence (edited with Allan Pred) (2007)
  19. •The Dictionary of Human Geography (5th edition) (edited with Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael Watts and Sarah Whatmore) (2009/forthcoming)
  20.  
  21. In preparation:
  22.  
  23. •Dancing on the Pyramids
  24. •Spaces
  25. •War cultures
  26. •Bombing: space, culture, power
  27. •Power, knowledge and geography
  28.  
  29. •Selected essays (from 2001):
  30.  
  31. •‘Cultures of travel and spatial formations of knowledge’, Erdkunde 54 (4) (2001) pp. 297-319. 2001.  
  32. •‘Colonial nostalgia and cultures of travel: spaces of constructed visibility in Egypt’, in Nezar AlSayyad (ed) Consuming tradition, manufacturing heritage: Global norms and urban forms in the age of tourism.  New York: Routledg (2001) pp. 111-151.
  33. • ‘(Post)colonialism and the production of nature’, in Noel Castree and Bruce Braun (eds) Social nature: theory, practice and politics.  Oxford UK and Cambridge MA: Blackwell (2003) pp. 84-111.
  34. •‘Emperors of the gaze: photographic practices and productions of space in Egypt, 1839-1914,’ in Joan Schwartz and James Ryan  (eds.)  Picturing place: photography and imaginative geographies  New York: I.B. Tauris. (2003) pp. 195-225, 329-335.
  35. • ‘Palestine under siege’, Antipode (36) (2004) pp. 595-600.2004.  
  36. •‘The lightning of possible storms.  Edward Said, 1935-2003’, Antipode (26 (2004) pp. 798-808.2004.  
  37. • ‘Geographies, publics and politics’, Progress in human geography 29 (2) (2005) pp. 182-189  
  38. •‘Performing Cairo: Orientalism and the city of the Arabian Nights’, in Nezar Al-Sayyad, Irene Bierman and Nasser Rabat (eds):Making Cairo Medieval [Transnational perspectives on space and place] (Lanham MD: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield) (2005) pp. 69-93
  39. •‘Colonial precedents and sovereign powers’, Progress in human geography 29 (3) (2005) pp. 367-7.
  40. •‘Troubling geographies’, in Noel Castree and Derek Gregory (eds) David Harvey: a critical reader (Oxford: Blackwell) (2005) pp. 1-25
  41. •‘The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the space of exception’, Geografiska Annaler B 89 (2006), pp. 405-427.
  42. •‘The death of the civilian’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006), pp. 633-638
  43. •‘“In another time zone, the bombs fall unsafely”: Targets, civilians and late modern war’, Arab World Geographer 9 (2) (2006) pp. 88-111 [published 2007]
  44. • ‘Vanishing points: Law, violence and exception in the global war prison’, in Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (eds) Violent geographies: fear, terror and political violence (New York: Routledge) pp. 205-236.
  45. •‘The long roll of thunder: Allan Pred 1936-2007’, Progress in human geography‘The rush to the intimate: counterinsurgency and the cultural turn in late modern war’, Radical philosophy 150 (July/August 2008) pp. 8-23.
  46. •‘The rush to the intimate: counterinsurgency and the cultural turn in late modern war’, Radical philosophy 150 (July/August 2008) pp. 8-23.
  47. •‘The Biopolitics of Baghdad: Counterinsurgency and the counter city’, Human Geography 1 (2008) pp. 6-27.
  48. •‘Adversary knowledges, dissident voices: the cultural turn in late modern war’, Proceedings of the Defence Science and Technology Symposium, Department of National Defence, Ottawa, May 2008 (in press)
  49. • ‘American military imaginaries and Iraqi cities: the visual economies of globalizing war’, in Christoph Lindner, ed., Globalization, violence and the visual culture of cities (New York: Routledge) (in press).
  50.  
  51. Honours and Awards
  52.  
  53. •William Vaughan Lewis Prize, University of Cambridge (1972)
  54. •Commonwealth Visiting Fellowship (1985)
  55. •I. W. Killam Research Prize, University of British Columbia (1994-5)
  56. •I.W. Killam Teaching Prize, University of British Columbia (1998-9)
  57. •Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Federal Republic of Germany (2000)
  58. •Dr. h.c.,  Honorary degree, Roskilde University, Denmark (2000)
  59. •I.W. Killam Faculty Research Fellowship, University of British Columbia (2001-2)
  60. •Distinguished University Scholar, University of British Columbia (2003)
  61. •Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2004)
  62. •I.W. Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring, Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of British Columbia (2005)
  63. •Founder’s Medal, Royal Geographical Society, London (2006)
  64. •Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (2007)
  65. •Dr. h.c., Honorary degree, University of Heidelberg, Germany (2007)
  66.  
  67. Visiting Professorships and Lectureships
  68.  
  69. Trewartha Lecture, University of Wisconsin at Madison  (1991)
 
  1. Progress in Human
Geography lecture,
Association of American
Geographers Annual
Conference, Chicago (1995)
        
  1. RGS/John Wiley Lecture, Canadian Association of Geographers Annual Conference (1996)
 
  1. Hettner Lecture, University of Heidelberg, Germany (1997)
 
  1. Kreisel Lectures in the Humanities, University of Alberta (1999)
 
  1. Alexander von Humboldt Lecture, University of Nijmegen, Netherlands (2001)        
 
  1. Distinguished Visiting Professor, University College, London, UK (2001
 
  1. Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Durham, UK (2002)
 
  1. Distinguished Visiting
Professor, Centre for the
Study of Geopolitics, Panjab
University, Chandigarh,
India (2003)
 
  1. Gordon Manley Lecture, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK (2004)
 
  1. Hart Lecture, University of Sheffield, UK (2006)
 
  1. Manchester Lecture on Environment and Development, University of Manchester, UK (2006)
 
  1. Solomon Katz Distinguished Lecturer in the Humanities,
University of Washington, Seattle, USA (2006)
 
  1. Plenary Address to Arab World Geographer Conference, Beirut, Lebanon (2006)
 
  1. Lennart Andersson Lecture, Karlstad University, Sweden (2007)
 
  1. Transactions Plenary Lecture, Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers, London (2008)
  2.