School of Geography and the Environment

Contents

• Overview
• Course Structure
• Fieldwork and Practicals
• Choosing a College
• Meet the Students
• Meet the Staff
• Open Days
• Selection Criteria
• Careers and Further Study
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Pilot Admissions Test
• How to Apply
• Enquiries

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UHS: Applying to read Geography

Meet the Staff

Information on our academic staff, their college affiliations and research interests is presented below. You can find out more about the staff members and their colleges by following the respective links.

The School has five major research clusters, with permeable boundaries and significant cross-cutting interests. These clusters are underpinned by external research funding; support staff; specialist computing and laboratory facilities; active postgraduate and postdoctoral communities; and non-academic collaborations. More information on our research clusters is provided on the cluster webpages:

• Biodiversity
• Climate Systems and Policy
• Landscape Dynamics
• Technological Natures: Materials, Cities, Politics
• Transformations: Economy and Society

Sort by Name | Sort by College

Name	Colleges	Summary of Research Interests
Dr Ken Addison (College Lecturer)	St Peter's College	Physical geography; glacial geomorphology.
Professor Myles Allen	Linacre College	How human and natural influences on climate contribute to observed climate change and risks of extreme weather and in quantifying their implications for long-range climate forecasts
Dr Richard Bailey	St Catherine's College	Quaternary palaeoclimate; geochronology (particularly luminescence-based methods) associated with environmental change, archaeology and palaeoanthrolpology; modelling luminescence processes; observations and modelling of vegetation patterning and critical thresholds in semi-arid systems; critical thresholds in environmental systems.
Professor David Banister (Director, Transport Studies Unit)	St Anne's College	Transport; cities; sustainability; energy; environment; participation
Professor Andrew Barry	St Catherine's College	The geography of science and technology; poststructuralist social and anthropological theory; materiality; political geography and geopolitics; the politics and economy of oil; Turkey and the Caucasus.
Dr Pam Berry (College Lecturer)	Mansfield College, Regent's Park College	Plant ecology, ecosystem monitoring, environmental issues, impact of climate change, plant species in Britain.
Dr Shonil Bhagwat (Course Director, MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management)	Linacre College	Agroecosystems: agroforestry, agriculture and food security, agriculture and conservation; Biodiversity conservation: conservation beyond reserves, community-based conservation, urban conservation; Climate change: climate change and culture, climate change and conservation, past climate change and biodiversity; Conservation and development: community-based conservation, conflict and conservation, integrated conservation and development; Culture and conservation: cultural and spiritual values, religion and conservation, sacred natural sites; Traditional knowledge: agrobiodiversity, biocultural diversity, species and habitat taboos
Dr Peter Bull	Hertford College	Forensic geoscience: including experimental studies on persistence and tenacity of trace evidence together with geochemical appraisals of forensic soil and rock samples; Palaeo-environmental and palaeo-energy conditions as determined from sand-sized sediment analysis utilising scanning electron microscopy; General sedimentology and environmental reconstruction.
Professor Gordon L. Clark	St Peter's College	Economic geography with global finance; corporate governance; finance markets; decision-making; pension funds; international finance; environmental management and regulation
Dr Paul Coones (College Lecturer)	Hertford College	Geographical thought (UK, Russia); historical geography; landscape studies; geopolitics.
Dr Simon Dadson	Christ Church	Processes that link climate, hydrology, and geomorphology.
Dr Patricia Daley	Jesus College, Pembroke College	Sub-Saharan Africa, especially topics on issues of forced migration; humanitarianism; gender; militarism; violence and ethnicity; as well as on aspects of political ecology in relation to land tenure; natural resource exploitation; community management of natural resources; forestry; indigenous knowledge; and wildlife conservation
Dr Fiona Ferbrache (College Lecturer)	No College Affiliation
Dr Richard Grenyer	Jesus College	Conservation - in particular conservation strategy, systematic conservation planning, biodiversity measurement and valuation. Biogeography, ecology and evolutionary ecology - particularly of mammals and plants. Phylogeography and phyloinformatics.
Professor Jim Hall	Linacre College	Flood risk analysis and management. Impacts of climate change and socio-economic change on flood risk. Robust flood risk management decisions under uncertainty. Coastal cliff recession prediction and appraisal. Use of probabilistic information in coastal management. Impacts of climate change on infrastructure systems and in cities. Infrastructure systems reliability and interdependence. Sensitivity analysis and model calibration. Decision analysis. Robust decision making under uncertainty. Info-gap theory.
Dr Rob Hope (Course Director, MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management)	No College Affiliation	Behavioural economics; water and development.
Professor Craig Jeffrey	St John's College	India, Asia, Youth, Children, Generation, Class, Caste, Gender, Work, Education, Development, Everyday Politics, Bourdieu
Dr Paul Jepson (Course Director, MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy)	No College Affiliation	Conservation governance; especially the role of measurement and categorisation schemes in assembling the institutions and practices of conservation, the agency of species and concepts in conservation networks, and the transformative potential of new media technologies.
Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright	St Cross College	Environmental health controversies, transition and social change in rural China, anthropological theory and ethnography. More specific topics: political ecology with particular interest in pollution and rural China, popular epidemiology and perceptions of risk, questioning the lay-expert divide, grassroots responses to health inequalities (especially in China and the developing world), cross-cultural environmental activism and environmental health activism, controversies in cancer epidemiology and lay cancer epidemiology.
Professor Yadvinder Malhi	Oriel College	Interactions between forest ecosystems, climate change and land-use change, including the utility of forest protection in mitigating climate change. Techniques applied in this research include plant ecophysiology, long term forest monitoring and short-term expeditions, forest micrometerological and flux measurements, manipulative experiments, and satellite remote sensing of intact forests and deforestation. His interests are global, but particularly focus on tropical forests, especially in the Andes and Amazon, and more recently on the woodlands of the Upper Thames.
Dr Derek McCormack	Mansfield College	Cultural geographies of the body, performance and mobility; geographies of affect and emotion; social theory and philosophies of space; urban cultural geographies; cultural geographies of art and creativity.
Professor Linda McDowell	St John's College	Gender divisions of labour; global migration; diasporic identities; new class divisions and employment change in the UK; meaning of home; urban change; feminist theory; methodologies and oral histories.
Dr Nick Middleton (College Lecturer)	St Anne's College	Arid geomorphology.
Professor Mark New	Christ Church	Observed climate change; climate change modelling; regional climate modelling; climate change in mountainous regions; climate change and water resources / hydrology.
Professor Judith Pallot	Christ Church	Rural society in pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia; the Soviet and Russian penal system; the geography of crime and punishment; spatial planning and regional development in the Soviet and post-Soviet period; historical and cultural geography of pre-revolutionary Russia and the USSR.
Dr Richard Powell	Mansfield College	Geographies of science; geopolitics and political geography; political economy of resources (especially oil and gas); ethnography; indigenous rights and governance; social and political theories, particularly with respect to scientific knowledges; environmental geography; historical and cultural geography; the Polar Regions (especially Canadian Arctic and Greenland)
Dr Ali Rogers (College Lecturer)	Keble College, Hertford College, St Catherine's College	Social and urban geography.
Esther Rootham (College Lecturer)	No College Affiliation
Dr Alistair Seddon (College Lecturer)	No College Affiliation
Dr Abi Stone (College Lecturer)	No College Affiliation
Professor David S.G. Thomas	Hertford College	Quaternary environments in the low latitudes, especially Africa; luminescence dating applications; aeolain systems; land degradation and human-environment interactions in drylands and Africa; climate change impacts and adaptation.
Dr Tom Thornton	No College Affiliation	Human ecology, adaptation, local and traditional ecological knowledge, biocultural diversity, conservation, coastal and marine environments, space and place, indigenous peoples and the political ecology of resource management.
Professor Heather Viles	Worcester College	Geomorphology and environmental change (especially in arid and karst environments); building stone deterioration and conservation; weathering and rock breakdown (especially in arid, coastal, karst and other extreme environments); rock breakdown on Mars and other planets.
Professor Richard Washington	Keble College	African climate science; climate change and variability in Africa; rainfall variability and prediction in Africa; mineral aerosol (dust) production and transport in Africa.
Professor Sarah Whatmore	Linacre College	The production and contestation of environmental knowledges/technologies; political theory at the intersection of democratic and scientific institutions and practices, including the constitution of publics and property rights; alternative moral economies - particularly as these relate to food; land-use and bioresources. She is particularly interested in working with students exploring feminist and post-structuralist philosophies and / or transdisciplinary approaches.
Professor Robert J. Whittaker	St Edmund Hall	Island ecology and biogeography; conservation biogeography; diversity theory
Dr Giles Wiggs	Brasenose College	Measuring and modelling aeolian processes in deserts with an emphasis on aeolian sediment transport; sand dune dynamics; dynamics of aeolian dust; desert geomorphology; and low latitude environmental change. Research techniques include fieldwork in southern Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and Australia in combination with wind tunnel and computer modelling. Enquiries concerning any aspect of desert geomorphology are welcomed.
Dr Lorraine Wild (College Lecturer)	St Hilda's College, Worcester College, Regent's Park College, St Edmund Hall	Urban and rural planning.
Dr Dariusz Wójcik	St Peter's College	Geographies of finance, economic geography, financial centres and global cities (including Shanghai and Dubai), emerging market economies, corporate governance, environmental finance (including carbon markets), varieties and models of capitalism, geography of advanced business services (including finance, law, management consultancy and accountancy).