Professor Tim Cresswell FBA
- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2025
- Sections
- Anthropology and Geography
Summary
Tim Cresswell is Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh.
He has PhDs in Geography (Wisconsin), where he was supervised by Yi-Fu Tuan, and Creative Writing (Royal Holloway, University of London) where he was supervised by Jo Shapcott.
His work focuses on the role of geographical knowledge and imagination in the formation of social and cultural life in a range of empirical domains from documentary photography and ballroom dancing to city planning and migration policy. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on the role of space, place and mobility in social and cultural life as well as over a 100 papers, chapters and essays on related themes.
His work has been instrumental in the development of the “new mobilities paradigm” and the emergence of the interdisciplinary fields of geohumanities and geopoetics.
Recent academic books include: Maxwell Street: Thinking and Writing Place (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Moving Towards Transition (co-authored, Zed Books, 2021), and Muybridge and Mobility (co-authored, University of California Press, 2022).
The Citizen and the Vagabond: A Politics of Mobility is due to be published by University of Minnesota Press in early 2026.
Cresswell is also a widely published poet with three collections – most recently Plastiglomerate (Penned in the Margins, 2020) which was long listed for the Laurel Prize in Ecopoetry.