Current Research
David Matless is Professor of Cultural Geography. He is the author of Landscape and Englishness (1998), an influential study of cultures of landscape in twentieth century England, and editor of The Place of Music (1998) and Geographies of British Modernity (2003). His 2014 book, In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads, published in the Wiley-Blackwell RGS-IBG Book Series, is a study in regional cultural landscape, addressing questions of landscape history and origin, cultures of conduct, animal and plant landscapes, and the ends of landscape in pollution and flood. A related 2015 volume, The Regional Book (Uniform Books), develops work on geographical description through an account of the Broads region. His wider areas of publication include the life and work of ecologist/artist Marietta Pallis (with Laura Cameron), British geographical studies of the Eastern bloc (with Adam Swain and Jonathan Oldfield), geographies of sound, the landscapes of documentary film, and the geography of ghosts. New areas of research include the role of museum displays in presenting landscapes of modern agriculture in the twentieth century, and the ways in which cultural geography might contribute to studies of climatic and environmental change through the theme of the 'Anthroposcenic'.
Past PhD supervision has covered a wide range of topics, and the following would be welcome as prospective areas of PhD research: landscape and English identity, regional cultural landscape, the cultural history of geographical knowledge, the geographies of sound, cultural geographies of the Anthropocene.