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 thirty articles and is co-editor of Selling Places: the city as cultural capital, past and present (1993) (with Chris Philo). He is currently working on 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).

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:

'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

'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.