Gerry Kearns BA PhD

University Senior Lecturer and Fellow of Jesus College

Gerry Kearns is a Co-Convenor of the Historical-Cultural Research Cluster. He is a director of the Centre for Gender Studies at Cambridge, and is Historical Geography Convenor for the European Social Science History Association. His research focuses on the history and cultural politics of public health; geography and imperialism; and geographical imaginaries of Irish nationalism. He has published over forty articles and is co-editor of Selling Places: the city as cultural capital, past and present (1993) (with Chris Philo) and Urbanising Britain: essays on class and community in the nineteenth century (1991) (with Charles Withers). He has recently finished Geopolitics and Empire, a book about the relations between the ideologies of Victorian-British and Neo-Conservative-American imperialism, and Vital Politics, an ESRC-funded international and interdisciplinary seminar series about the political, economic and social circumstances under which the beginning and end of life are culturally and technologically constructed (with Simon Reid-Henry, Queen Mary College, University of London). He is currently working on a book about the geography of Irish nationalism, Young Ireland: colonialism, violence, nationalism.

Biography

Career:

1980-1992: University of Liverpool
1992-1995: University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
1995-present: Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.

Qualifications

BA 1978 University of Cambridge
PhD 1985 University of Cambridge, "Aspects of cholera, society and space in nineteenth-century England and Wales."

Research

Historical and Cultural Geography

Publications

Selected publications:

'Geography, geopolitics, and empire,' Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2010)
(and Simon Reid-Henry), 'Vital geographies: life, luck and the human condition,' Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99:3 (2009) 554-574
'Mackinder Redux,' Human Geography 2:2 (2009) 44-47
Geopolitics and Empire: the legacy of Halford Mackinder (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
'Progressive Geopolitics,' Geography Compass 2:5 (2008) 1599-1620
'Taking theory for a walk in Ireland,' in Elizabeth Gagen, Hayden Lorimer and Alex Vasudevan (eds), Practicing the archive: reflections on methods and practice in historical geography (London: Historical Geography Research Group, 2008) 9-22
'The history of medical geography after Foucault,' in Stuart Elden and Jeremy Crampton (eds) Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and Geography (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2007) 205-222
'Bare life, political violence and the territorial structure of Britain and Ireland,' in Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (eds), Violent geographies: fear, terror and political violence (New York: Routledge, 2006) 9-34
'The spatial poetics of James Joyce,' New Formations 57 (2006) 107-125.
'Naturalising empire: echoes of Mackinder for the next American century?' Geopolitics 11 (2006) 74-98.
'Mother Ireland and the revolutionary sisters,' Cultural Geographies 11 (2004) 459-483
'The political pivot of geography,' Geographical Journal 170 (2004) 337-346
'Nation, empire, cosmopolis: Ireland and the break with Britain,' in David Gilbert, Dave Matless and Brian Short (eds), Geographies of British modernity: space and society in the twentieth century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) 204-228.
'Time and some citizenship: nationalism and Thomas Davis', Bullan: an Irish Studies Journal 5 (2001) 23-54
'"Educate that holy hatred": place, trauma and identity in the Irish nationalism of John Mitchel', Political Geography 20 (2001) 885-911
'Town hall and Whitehall: sanitary intelligence and the relations between central and local government, the case of Liverpool, 1840-63', in S. Sheard and H. Power (eds), The body and the city: histories of urban public health (Leicester: Avebury, 2000) 89-108
'The virtuous circle of facts and values in the New Western History.' Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88:3 (1998) 377-409
'The imperial subject: geography and travel on the work of Mary Kingsley and Halford Mackinder.' Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22 (1997) 450-472

Media

Interviewed about 'Heartland Theory' on BBC Radio Three's 'Sunday Feature. Ideas: The British Version,' 27 September 2009
Interviewed about Geopolitics and Empire on BBC Radio Four's 'Thinking Allowed', 29 June 2009
'Video interview on Public Knowledge,' Public Knowledge Journal 1:1 (2009): http://pkjournal.org/blog/?page_id=339.
'Fenian Diaspora' - Discussion of research on Ireland on BBC Radio Four's 'Thinking Allowed' programme (21st February 2007)

Teaching

Geographical Tripos (Undergraduate level)
IA Historical/Cultural Geography
IB Cities
II Historical geography of the AIDS pandemic

External activities

Editorial Board, Journal of Historical Geography.
Editorial Board, Historical Geography.
Editorial Board, Irish Geography.