Professor Derek McCormack

Derek is Professor of Cultural Geography and current Head of the School of Geography and the Environment, having joined the School in 2006. He is originally from Leixlip, Ireland. He has a BA (Hons, first class) in Geography and Sociology from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth; an MSc in Geography from Virginia Tech; and a PhD in Geography from the University of Bristol. Prior to taking up his post at Oxford, Derek taught at the Department of Geography at the University of Southampton.

Over the course of his career so far Derek has made contributions to several areas of geographical research, including:

• Non-representational theories and geographies of affect. See, for instance, McCormack, D (2013) Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces (Duke University Press)
• Cultural geographies of atmosphere. See, for instance McCormack, D (2018) Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment (Duke University Press)
• Elemental Geographies. See, for instance, Engelmann and McCormack (2021) “Elemental Worlds”, Progress in Human Geography, 45 (6): 1419-1439

He is currently writing about reflection as a process of environmental mediation. He also continues to be interested in the generative overlaps between geography and artistic practices. For instance, in June 2026, with Professor Alexandra Kolb (Roehampton) and Dr Michael Shaw (Loughborough), he co-curated ‘Choreographing inflatables: Place, Politics, Performance’, as part of the British Academy Ideas festival.

Derek is a member of the Tech Life Research Cluster.

Undergraduate Teaching

Derek usually lectures on human geography topics for the Preliminary and FHS Examinations. 

Postgraduate Teaching

Derek sometimes teaches on the NSEG MSc. He is open to supervising DPhil students in cultural geography and related fields. For enquiries about potential supervision please contact Derek directly.

Current Graduate Research Students

Recent Graduate Research Students