Research in the cluster coheres around the connections between culture, landscape and history. Some of the research conducted in this cluster is orchestrated around two interdisciplinary research centres, the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (CCPS) and the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH).
The imperial networks through which British and colonial cultures and environments were co-constituted are the subject of investigation by both Alan Lester and Richard Grove (with Katie Walsh's work also on with Britishness abroad), while Grace Carswell focuses on the environmental changes associated with colonial and postcolonial cultures in Africa.
Alan Lester works on the historical geography of the 19th century British Empire, emphasising the traffic in people, ideas and materials between different colonial and metropolitan spaces. Follow the links for examples of his recent work on individual trajectories across the British empire and the co-constitution of nineteenth century Britain and South Africa. Together with Fae Dussart, he is currently completing a Leverhulme-funded project on the trans-imperial history of Aboriginal Protection, particularly in Australia and New Zealand.
Richard Grove is widely recognized as a leading environmental historian of the British Empire. Like Lester, Grove is interested in the circuits by which ideas, personnel and policies traveled from one colonial site to another, and between metropole and colony. His best known book is Green Imperialsm. He has also traced the origins of forest conservation back to British imperial networks, and interrogated colonial records to shape his analysis of climatic crises caused by El Nino.
Grace Carswell, too, researches the relationships between colonial interventions, environmental change and indigenous farmer agency, in her case, in East Africa. Follow the links for examples of her East African work on the continuity of colonial environmental narratives, on the problems encountered with the failure of colonial cash crop schemes and on the complex geographies of colonial conservation schemes.
Brian Short has mapped contested ideologies of rural landscape conservation and the politics of landownership in Victorian and Edwardian England, examining for the first time the place of micro-history within historical geography. At the invitation of English Heritage, he has written on the history and meanings of landscape in South East England,and has recently begun to explore the impact of the Second World War on English rural communities, and in particular the social and environmental changes wrought through the local power relations of the British state.
Simon Rycroft is a leading geographer of radical urban cultures in the 1960s, especially in Los Angeles and London. He has pioneered the analysis of such cultures from a countercultural perspective and shown, for the first time, how they engage with 'nature', an engagement that drew upon a series of influences in, for instance, the 'Op Art' of Bridget Riley, or the writing of 1950s' Angry Young Men. Follow the links for examples of his work on Underground and Swinging London and on Los Angeles in the 1960s. He has recently published the monograph Swinging City: The Cultural Geographies of London 1950-1974 (Ashgate 2011).
Ben Rogaly works on the social and historical geographies of identity, race, class and migration in England and political economic geographies of temporary migrant work in India and the UK.
Associated faculty include:
Grace Carswell: Grace's research interests include rural livelihoods in eastern Africa, population-environment interactions and agricultural change under the influence of colonialism.
Richard Grove: Richard Grove specialises in World environmental history; the environmental history of South Asia, the West Indies and Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean islands; El Nino and extreme climate events; the intellectual history of ideas about the environment; violence and the environment, and globalisation and impacts on indigenous peoples and their environments.
Alan Lester: Alan Lester has written extensively on the historical geographies of South Africa and, more recently, on trans-imperial networks and trajectories, settler colonisation and humanitarian discourses of colonialism in the nineteenth century British Empire.
Ben Rogaly: Migration of agricultural workers, political economy and agrarian capitalisms in India and the UK; seasonal migration, social relations and changing social identities.
Simon Rycroft: Post-war cultural geography of Britain and America; images of modernity; urban territorial identities; cultures of nature, landscape and the environment.
Brian Short: Historical geography of South East England; 19th- and 20th-century rural social change with a particular interest in the impact of the Second World War on the countryside; rural geography and landscape studies.
Katie Walsh: Migration, home and belonging; transnational spaces and identities; British expatriates; Gulf region.