School of Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography Research Theme
Stonehenge, Wiltshire, 3 August 2013 by Simon Roberts. Simon is an Honorary Associate Professor with the school, and was commissioned to take a series of photographs for Stephen Daniels, Ben Cowell and Lucy Veale's 2015 Landscapes of the National Trust volume.
For over 40 years, the School of Geography at Nottingham has been a leading centre for research in cultural and historical geography, and today we are one of the world’s largest groups of researchers working in this area.
Nottingham’s reputation in shaping these two important subfields is recognised nationally and internationally. This recognition is exemplified by the decision to host the 50th anniversary events of both the Royal Geographical Society’s Historical Geography Research Group (2023) and Social and Cultural Geography Research Group (2024) at the school. Members of the theme serve as Chairs of the RGS-IBG annual conference and edit the field’s leading journals and book series.
Our research is politically engaged and interdisciplinary. Reflecting our long-standing relationships with the arts and humanities, members of theme have received prestigious grants from the likes of the AHRC, British Academy and Leverhulme Trust. Our research also underpins the distinctive undergraduate and postgraduate teaching we offer, as well as our commitment to innovative public engagement.
Key research areas
Landscape and Culture
The School of Geography at Nottingham was one of the foundational sites of the "new cultural geography" of the 1980-90s and it continues to pioneer new ways of investigating how landscapes are inhabited, imagined and represented. This scholarship ranges from artistic depictions of lost landscapes to recent efforts to confront environmental change in the Anthropocene.
Race and Empire
Research in this area has been at the forefront of interrogating the geographies of colonialism and Empire as well as confronting their ongoing legacies. In recent years, this work has fed into broader debates concerned with decolonising our institutions, our curricula and our public spaces.
Our scholarship has placed these debates in a global and historical context by exploring the emergence, for example, of black internationalist and pan-African politics, as well as researching how colonial legacies are shaping contemporary migration governance.
Nature and the Non-Human
The school has a long-standing interest in challenging the traditional human-centered focus of cultural and historical geography. Research has examined the relationships between human and non-human actors and agencies, including animals, technology, and the natural world.
Themes have included extinction, de-extinction, rewilding, and the ‘Anthroposcenic’. The school has also been host to several workshops and events on animal geographies.
Cartography and Geographical Thought
Research in this area addresses the cultural, political and intellectual history of geographical ideas. It examines the disciplinary history of Geography both within and beyond the university, the role of cartography and maps in representing geographical knowledge, and the emergence of key geographical concepts which have shaped wider cultural and political life, such as internationalism.