Tim Cresswell

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Professor Tim Cresswell is a human geographer at the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of four books on the role of space and mobility in cultural life.

After attending Woolverstone Hall School he received his B.A. from University College London before undertaking his postgraduate education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S., where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1992, supervised by the renowned humanistic geoographer Yi-Fu Tuan. He returned to the United Kingdom, teaching at the University of Wales, Lampeter until 1999 and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth until 2006.

His research interests are in social and cultural geography, specifically geographies of mobility, such as walking, ballroom dance, and international airports, and their role in shaping cultural outlooks.

Cresswell's most cited work is 'In Place/Out of Place' (1996). Here, he effectively discusses notions of place and practices of resistance that may shape them, illustrating his arguments with case studies of graffiti in New York City and the protests at Greenham Common in the 1980s, to name but two examples. His book The Tramp in America (2001) describes the intervention of the tramp as a social type in the United States between 1869 and 1939. 'Place: A Short Introduction' (2004) provides a succinct introduction to the themes that he has researched. His most recent book is 'On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World' (2006) which considers mobility in sites such as the workplace, the dancefloor and the international airport.

Away from these core themes of place, mobility and resistance, Tim Cresswell has edited an Environment and Planning special publication on the influence in human geography of Pierre Bourdieu (2002) and co-edited, with Deborah Dixon, a book on the geographies of film entitled "Engaging Film" (2002).

[edit] Publications

2006, "On the Move: Mobility in the Modern World"
2004. Place: A Short Introduction
2002. Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity (co-edited with Deborah Dixon)
2001. The Tramp in America
1996. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression
with Hoskin B (1999) 'The beat which is currently popular: American music in Britain', Peter Taylor and David Sadler (eds) The American Century: Consensus and Coercion in the Projection of American Power (Blackwell).
(1999) 'Mobility, syphilis and democracy: the pathologization of the tramp' in Richard Wrigley, George Reville (eds) Pathologies of Travel (Rodepi)
(1999) 'Falling Down: Resistance as diagnostic' in Chris Philo et al (eds) Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Dominance/Resistance (Routledge)
(2001) 'Geosophy, Mobility and Other Ways of Knowing' for Paul Adams, Steven Hoelscher and Karen Till (eds) Textures of Place: Essays in Honor of Yi-Fu Tuan (University of Wisconsin Press).
(1999) 'Place' in Paul Cloke, Philip, Crang and Mark Goodwin (eds) Introducing Human Geographies (London: Arnold) pp226-234
(1999) 'Embodiment, Power and the Politics of Mobility: The Case of Female Tramps and Hobos'. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24.2: 175-192
(1998) 'Night discourse: producing/ consuming meaning on the street' in Nick Fyfe (ed) Images of the Street (Routledge): 268-279
(1998) 'The peninsular of submerged hope: Ben Reitman's social geography' Geoforum 29. [2]: 207-216
(1997) 'Weeds, plagues and bodily secretion: A geographical analysis of metaphors of displacement' Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, [No.2] : 330-345
(1997) 'Imagining the nomad: mobility and the postmodern primitive' in Ulf Strohmayer and George Benko (Eds) Space and Social Theory: Geographical Interpretations of Post-Modernity' (Oxford, Blackwell): 360-382
(1996) 'Reading, writing and the problem of resistance: A reply to McDowell', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21, [No.4]:420-424