About the Centre for the GeoHumanities

The Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities is a major interdisciplinary initiative cultivating links between arts and humanities scholars, creative practitioners, geographers and the cultural and heritage sectors.

The GeoHumanities is a term that describes the growing interdisciplinary engagement between Geography and arts and humanities disciplines. Its use in recent years reflects shared interests across these disciplines in scholarship on key geographical concepts such as space, place, landscape and environment.

The emergence of the GeoHumanities reflects recent developments in theory (including the spatial turn and the idea of the Anthropocene), politics (the increasing urgency of environmental crises and questions of displacement), technology (from the embrace of geo-coded data to artificial intelligence) and practice (site -specific performance art and the creative use of locative media).

The GeoHumanities also have a longer intellectual history rooted in the pre-disciplinary origins of Geography as ‘earth writing’. Geography has never been the exclusive preserve of geographers and has always posed a challenge to modern disciplinary thinking. It is therefore unsurprising that the GeoHumanities has emerged as a key field of interdisciplinary inquiry.

The work of the Centre focuses on four themes:

·        Environmental imaginations

·        Mobilities and the humanities

.        Creative interventions in urban space and the environment

·        Heritage, culture and nature

The Centre is also committed to supporting exchange between academics and practitioners through a programme of Creative Commissions. There have been three rounds of this programme since 2017, each with a distinct theme: ‘Creating earth futures’, ‘Variations on mobility’ and ‘Creating diasporic worlds’.