photo of Mick Dunford

Prof Mick Dunford

Post:Emeritus Professor (Geography)
Other posts:Professor of Economic Geography (Centre for Global Political Economy)
Location:ARTS C C205
Email:M.F.Dunford@sussex.ac.uk

Telephone numbers
Internal:8034 or 7238
UK:01273 678034 or 01273 877238
International:+44 1273 678034 or +44 1273 877238
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Biography

Short version 

Michael (Mick) Dunford is Emeritus Professor, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Visiting Professor, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Managing Editor of Area Development and Policy. He graduated with B.Sc in Geography and M.Sc in Quantitative Economics from the University of Bristol. In 2000, he was elected to the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences (AcSS). In 2003, he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Edward Heath Award for geographical research in Europe and is a Fellow of the Regional Studies Association (FERSA). His interests are in global development (at multiple geographical scales and with special reference at different times to Europe and the western world, China, Eurasia and the wider world system) drawing on materialist conceptions of history and geography and on theories of uneven and combined development, regulation and geopolitical economy. His most recent publications deal with the Chinese social model, Chinese poverty alleviation, common prosperity, Chinese economic development since 1949, the Belt and Road Initiative and China’s international engagement. He has also written on global economic evolutions and the emergence of a new multipolar world order. 

More details

BSc Geography (Bristol 1971, 1st Class Honours) MSc Quantitative Economics (Bristol 1974, Commendation)

Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography, Visiting Professor, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences,  former Editor of Regional Studies (1997-2002) and Managing Editor of Area Development and Policy.

Michael (Mick) Dunford graduated with degrees in Geography (1st Class Honours) and Quantitative Economics (with Commendation) from the University of Bristol. He worked at Sussex from September 1973 until December 2013. He is an Honorary member of the Società Geografica Italiana. In 1997 he was appointed Editor of Regional Studies (1977-2002), was a founding and the current Managing Editor of Area Development and Policy and has served on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Espaces et Sociétés, Sciences de la Société, Economic Geography and European Urban and Regional Studies. In 2000 he was elected to the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences (AcSS), in 2003 was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Edward Heath Award for geographical research in Europe and is a Fellow of the Regional Studies Association. From 2010 until 2015 he was Visiting Professorship for Senior International Scientists in the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (IGSNRR). From 2016 until the present he is a Visiting Professor at IGSNRR.

He has been Visiting Professor at the universities of Toulouse, Pavia, Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne and Sciences-Po in Paris. In the 1990s he gave two University of Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Science Studies courses (1994 and 1998). In 2017 he gave a Summer School course at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Since 1998 he has also taught courses and been an invited contributor to conferences in Rennes (EUROSTAT), Tuzla in Bosnia-Hercegovina , Brussels (European Parliament), Vienna, Berlin, Bilbao, Banja Luka in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Strasbourg (Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe), Natal, São Carlos, Campinas, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Aix-en-Provence, Eisenerz in Austria, Ankara in Turkey, Varese, Caserta, Rome, Salerno, Naples, St Petersburg, Moscow, Aveiro, Naxos, Paris, Chambéry, Angers, Lyon, Rome, Florence, Naples, L'Aquila, Tampere, Galway, Coimbra, Recife, Brasilia, Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Taizhong, Kaifeng, Lanzhou, Dalian, Wuhan, Nanjing, Melbourne, Bangkok, Urumuqi, Taibei and Lugano amongst many other places, as well as numerous conferences and workshops in the UK. In recent years he has participated in a significant number of online meetings.

He is the author of Capital, the State and Regional Development (Pion, 1988), and Rhône-Alpes in the 1990s (Economist Intelligence Unit, 1991), and co-author with Diane Perrons of The Arena of Capital (Macmillan, 1983 and with Lidia Greco of After the Three Italies (Blackwell, 2006). With George Benko he has co-edited Industrial Change and Regional Development (Belhaven, 1991) and with Grigoris Kafkalas Cities and Regions in the New Europe: the Global-Local Interplay and Spatial Development Strategies (Belhaven, 1992). In 2015 he edited The Geographical Transformation of China with Liu Weidong (Routledge, 2015). He has also published numerous papers and chapters on uneven development in Europe, global inequality and development and Chinese urban and regional geography. At present he is working on the evolution of the Chinese social model, China's international engagement including the Belt and Road Initiative.

At Sussex in the new millennium he was Principal Investigator for two ESRC-funded projects: Regional economic performance, governance and cohesion in an enlarged Europe' (graded outstanding), and Inter-dependence and Comparative Regional Dynamics in Developed and Developing Economies: Trade and Regional Trajectories in China and the European Union. He held a two-year Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship for a project entitled Cities, regions and the sustainable transformation of the Chinese earth and is at present working on a five-year project funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

His research focused initially on French, Italian and British regional evolutions, comparative European regional development and policy, industrial change and global value chain research. From 2006 he developed an interest in relations between Europe and China and a number of Chinese development issues. In 2008 he was involved in the preparation of a report on regional policy in the EU and China whose origin lay in his participation in an EU-China policy dialogue that started in 2006. In 2008-11 he participated in a number of projects involving GIZ and the Chinese State Council Leading Group on Poverty Alleviation and Development that dealt with economic reconstruction after the Wenchuan and Yushu earthquakes and with poverty alleviation and economic development in 14 poor and remote mountainous areas in China. Other research dealt with trade and industrial and regional and urban development in China and the European Union and rural economic development in disaster-affected and poverty areas in China, urban-rural integration in China, Chinese industrial development, China's Belt and Road Initiative, sustainable (green) and inclusive development, and Chinese concepts of a shared community for mankind and common prosperity. At a more theoretical level he is interested in regulation-theoretic approaches to the analysis of the implications for global development of economic crises in the western world and the rise of China and in concepts of uneven and combined development.

Fuller details of his publications are provided in the recent publications list and on his publications page.