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Department of Geography

 

Distinguished International Visitor Programme

The Department is pleased to announce its Distinguished International Visitor Programme. The aim of the programme is to encourage engagement at all levels with a small number of distinguished scholars from around the world whose work has made a significant contribution to geographical thought and practice.

Each Distinguished International Visitor visits Cambridge for about a week, helping to forge new research collaborations. Typically, they will deliver a public talk, a specialist seminar, and engage with staff and postgraduate students with cognate research interests.

Professor Mark Carey

Professor Mark Carey

June, 2022

University of Oregon

Professor James Scott

Professor James Scott

8th – 9th May, 2019

Yale University

Professor Rebecca Lave

Professor Rebecca Lave

23rd – 24th January, 2019

Indiana University

Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen

Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen

21st – 22nd February, 2018

Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen

Professor Ananya Roy

Professor Ananya Roy

17th – 18th January, 2018

The Institute on Inequality and Democracy, University of California, Los Angeles

Professor Didier Fassin

Professor Didier Fassin (Institute for Advanced Study; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

14th – 16th February, 2017

Professor Didier Fassin is the James Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Professor Don Mitchell

Professor Don Mitchell (Syracuse University)

8th – 10th November 2016

Professor Don Mitchell is Distinguished Professor of Geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

Professor Tania Murray Li

Prof Tania Li (University of Toronto)

23rd-24th February 2016

Professor Tania Murray Li is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in the Culture and Political-Economy of Asia. Recent publications include: Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (2014), and Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia, with Philip Hirsch and Derek Hall (2011).

Prof AbdouMaliq Simone

Prof AbdouMaliq Simone (University of South Australia)

2 November 2015

Professor AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist in the broad sense that his work focuses on various powers, cultural expressions, governance and planning discourses, spaces and times in cities across the world. Simone is presently Professor at the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding at the University of South Australia. Previously, he was Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has taught at New School University, the University of Khartoum, University of Ghana, University of the Western Cape, University of the Witwatersrand and the City University of New York, as well as working for several African NGOs, municipal governments and regional institutions, including the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa and the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements.

Diana Liverman

Professor Diana Liverman (University of Arizona)

2nd-5th March 2015

Professor Diana Liverman will be International Visiting Fellow in the Department of Geography during the week commencing 2nd March 2015. There will be a departmental seminar on 2nd March, a public lecture on 3rd March and a graduate forum on 4th March.

Her expertise and research interests focus on the human dimensions of environmental change, connecting earth and social sciences to understand challenges of drought and climate change, climate policy, climate change communication, food security, land use, and international environmental governance. She is probably best known for her research on climate vulnerability, climate assessment, carbon offsets and climate and development; she has also published on NAFTA and the environment, planetary boundaries and climate governance.

Nick Blomley

Professor Nick Blomley (Simon Fraser University)

8th-12th September 2014

Nick Blomley is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is a geographer, with a general interest in law, and a particular interest in property in land. He has traced the work of property in many conflicts and social relations, including gentrification, urban gardening, the municipal regulation of panhandling and, most recently, indigenous-state treaties. He is currently engaged in team-based research on the use of ‘area restrictions’ included in bail and sentencing conditions imposed in the context of criminal proceedings involving marginalized groups of people. He is also part of a large collaborative project exploring the liquidation of Japanese-Canadian property after WWII. He is interested in bringing together philosophical pragmatism and performativity theory to take seriously the enactments of property.

Paul Robbins

Professor Paul Robbins (Nelson Institute, Madison)

9th-15th February 2014

Our first 2014 Distinguished International Fellow is Professor Paul Robbins, Director of the Nelson Institute at the University of Madison-Wisconsin.

He brings with him a wealth of expertise in the field of political ecology. He is the author of the famous analysis of the ecology of suburban American lawns in his book Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are (2007), in which he famously asked “how did the needs of grass come to be my own?”. In this interdisciplinary study, he skilfully combines interviews and archival sources with satellite imagery to produce the first detailed picture of what lawns mean as a large scale ecological system. His recent work continues to challenge us to practice political ecology as an on-going dialectical engagement with non-human nature. His textbook Political Ecology is the standard reference work for a new generation of students. His enthusiasm for bringing together critical analysis and fieldwork will be on display in the three events marking his Visit: a public lecture, a departmental seminar, and an early career seminar.

Seminars

There are no seminars scheduled at present, but you can view the archive of previous seminars.