Professor Gillian Rose appointed Head of the School of Geography and the Environment
Professor Rose is the third female Head of School, since the department's establishment by Halford John Mackinder in 1899. She succeeds Professor Heather Viles (2015-19) and Professor Sarah Whatmore (2012-15). Dr Marjorie Sweeting was acting Head of the School from 1983-1984.
Professor Gillian Rose joined the School of Geography and the Environment as Professor of Human Geography in 2017, moving from The Open University. She was awarded her PhD from the University of London in 1990 and has since taught at the University of London and Edinburgh University as well as being an Andrew W Mellon Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Pretoria in 2015. Professor Rose was Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University and also Head of the Geography Department there for four years. She was named the Ander Visiting Professor in Geomedia Studies at Karlstad University in 2018. In 2015 Gillian was elected a fellow of the British Academy and, earlier this year, was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Professor Rose is a cultural geographer. Although her empirical research interests have shifted over time, she has long been concerned with the politics of knowledge production: who creates what kinds of knowledges, how those knowledges circulate and transform, and what kinds of worlds are thus constituted. She has published widely on feminist theorisations of visuality and her first book, Feminism and Geography: The Limits to Geographical Knowledge (1993), made a significant contribution to the emergence of feminist geography. More recently Gillian's work has explored the visual mediation of urban spaces using digital technologies. She has led a number of successful ESRC-funded research projects on this topic.
On behalf of all the members of the School of Geography and the Environment, Professor Rose would like to thank the previous Head of School, Professor Heather Viles, for her outstanding leadership of the School over the past four years.