Find a supervisor
A list of all our Geography PhD supervisors and their research interests.
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Initially, you should identify and approach a potential supervisor with compatible research interests and expertise. They will be able to help you to develop your proposed research ideas into a strong and viable project. The research interests listed below should help you find expertise in the topics that you wish to pursue.
Human Geographers
| Supervisor | Research Interests |
| Dr Megan Blake | Food Poverty; food in cities; neoliberalism and food; food and third sector organisations; urban food plans; food and consumption; food and tourism; local food; consumer/retailer food waste; food and family practices. |
| Dr Stephanie Butcher | Urban inequalities & informality in global South cities; global sustainable development; gender/diversity/ intersectionality; community/urban planning & development; social movements; housing and infrastructure; theories of citizenship, equality, social/environmental justice. |
| Professor Vanesa Castan Broto | Global environmental governance; climate change politics; urban political ecology; urban sustainability transitions; social innovation and urban technology; participatory planning; governmentality. |
| Dr Jessica Dubow | Cultural/Critical Geography; spatial and aesthetic theory; psychoanalysis; continental philosophy; critical theory with a specific emphasis on Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School and a focus on themes of exile, dislocation and displaced identity. Also: landscape theory and practice; postcolonial theory; geographies of religion and of psychoanalysis; South African history/culture. |
| Dr Daniel Hammett | Forms and practices of citizenship; spaces for and practices of civil society; popular geopolitics. |
| Professor Peter Jackson | Social and cultural geography; geographies of consumption; food and families. |
| Dr Juan Miguel Kanai | Varieties of urban Entrepreneurial Regimes including eco-entrepreneurialism and homo-entrepreneurialism; culture-led regeneration; planetary urbanisation; territorial design and infrastructure networks. |
| Dr Dorothea Kleine | Digital geographies; ICT4D; development theory; Fair Trade and ethical consumption.
Particularly, in the following areas
|
| Dr Ankit Kumar | Climate justice, energy justice, energy transitions, infrastructure, environmental geographies, critical development studies and postcolonial studies. |
| Professor Simon Marvin |
Telecommunications, infrastructure and mobility, sustainability, systemic transitions, climate change, ecological security and smart cities. |
| Dr Eric Olund | Race, gender and sexuality; governmentality; urban life; critical theory. |
| Professor Richard Phillips |
Cultural and Social Geographies of Difference: Religion, Race and Ethnicity; Sexualities and Genders - Politics and Spaces; Creative Methods and Fieldwork; Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. |
| Professor Jenny Pickerill | Eco-housing, eco-communities, environmentalism and community economies. |
| Dr Sammia Poveda |
ICT for human development; critical agency, empowerment and social structures; psychosocial wellbeing; gender, class, race, etc (intersectionality). |
| Professor Bhavani Shankar | Sustainable diets, climate and nutrition-sensitive food systems, food and nutrition policy evaluation and inequities in food systems and nutrition. |
| Dr Luke Temple | Political and electoral geography, democratic theory and democratization, political participation, and patterns of digital engagement. |
| Dr Matt Watson | Theories of practice, sustainability and social change, especially in relation to energy, food, water, mobility, waste. Cultural geographies of energy and environment - reducing demand, reducing carbon intensity. |
Physical Geographers
Please read through the list of physical geography example PhD topics to get a flavour of the areas of research our staff are particularly interested in supervising.
| Supervisor | Research Interests |
|---|---|
| Professor Mark Bateman | Sandscapes as an archive for understanding past depositional processes and environmental changes which have shaped the landscape we live in; periglacial and glacial environments; luminescence dating; coastal dune systems. |
| Dr Rob Bryant | Earth Observation and Geospatial Technologies - and applications of these to aeolian processes, dust hazards and general themes within landscape/atmospheric fluxes and dynamics. |
| Dr Frances Butcher | Glacial processes and landscapes on Mars, and Earth analogues. |
| Professor Chris Clark | Palaeoglaciology (the extent and dynamics of former ice sheets) and palaeo-ice stream signatures and ice-stream operation; remote sensing; digital elevation models (DEMs); glacial geomorphology. |
| Dr Jeremy Ely | Palaeoglaciology and glacial geomorphology. |
| Dr Julie Jones | Southern Hemisphere and Antarctic climate change and variability; climate reconstruction from proxy data, long instrumental and historical records (including ships' logbooks). |
| Dr Sihan Li | Fine scale regional climate modelling, especially at convection-permitting scale; multi-hazard and risk chain associated with climate change and impact modelling of multi-hazards; land-hydrology-climate interactions, predictability of hydrometeorological extremes, extreme event attribution; exploring large-scale and mesoscale dynamical drivers of regional hydroclimate change, and climate change impacts on wildfires, forest mortality, land-use change, hydrology and the energy sector; machine learning/AI application in seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasts. |
| Dr Stephen Livingstone | Glacier hydrology (on palaeo and contemporary ice sheets); subglacial lakes; ice sheet reconstructions; ice-bed processes and landforms; meltwater erosion and deposition. |
| Dr Manoj Menon | Soil physics and hydrology; soil structure development; root-soil interactions; soil compaction; soil pollution; soil-flood interactions; soil conservation practices; non-invasive imaging and modelling. |
| Dr Felix Ng | Mathematical modelling of physical processes in glaciers and ice sheets and their environment interactions; ice sheet/stream dynamics of Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets; internal (radar) stratigraphy; Mars's cryosphere (processes, evolution, and landforms); physics of ice-core records. |
| Dr Tom Pering | The measurement of sulphur dioxide, using ultra violet cameras; modelling via computational fluid dynamics and laboratory analogues of a variety of degassing modes from basaltic magmas, including: passive, strombolian, and lava fountaining; low-cost alternatives to previously expensive methods. |
| Professor Ed Rhodes | Palaeoseismology and fault slip-rate studies; luminescence technical developments; low temperature thermochronology; grain tracing and transport rate; palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction; fluvial and aeolian geomorphology; grain mixing; surface processes; natural carbon sequestration. |
| Dr Andrew Sole | Hydrology, dynamics and mass balance of ice sheets and glaciers, particularly the Greenland Ice Sheet and marine-terminating glaciers; physical and biogeochemical interations of ice sheets and glaciers with the ocean; quantifying ice flow using satellite feature tracking. |
| Dr Darrel Swift | Glacial erosion and long-term landscape evolution; glacial sediment systems and landform evolution processes; glacier and ice sheet geomorphology and dynamics; glacier hydrology and fluvioglacial sediment systems; mountain geomorphology. |