Professor Alison Blunt

Professor Alison Blunt
Professor of Geography

School of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
Phone: 020 7882 8437
Fax: 020 7882 7479
Email: a.blunt@qmul.ac.uk

Alison Blunt is Professor of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography, NTNU, Trondheim. Alison’s research interests include feminist and postcolonial geographies; imperial travel and domesticity; and geographies of home, identity, migration and diaspora. Her research has been funded by the AHRC, ESRC, The Leverhulme Trust, and Urban Buzz. She was awarded the Gill Memorial Award from the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) in 2002, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2003. Alison chairs the London Women and Planning Forum and is the editor of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers from 2008 – 13.

Research interests:

1. Diaspora cities: imagining Calcutta in London, Toronto and Jerusalem (www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/diasporacities)
Although ideas and lived experiences of diaspora are intrinsically transnational, a wide range of research invokes the nation through material and imaginative connections to a past, present or imagined ‘homeland.’ Other research focuses on the city as a site of diasporic resettlement, exploring the contested terrains of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. Focusing on four communities from Calcutta (Anglo-Indian, Brahmo, Chinese and Jewish), this research investigates the importance of the city rather than the nation in shaping, recasting and articulating diasporic identities, and studies diaspora cities as places of origin and resettlement. This research is funded by The Leverhulme Trust from 2007-10 (£143,608), with the research team consisting of myself as Principal Investigator, Noah Hysler-Rubin and Shompa Lahiri (postdoctoral research fellows) and Jayani Bonnerjee (PhD student).

2. Gender and the built environment
In partnership with Wendy Davis, director of the Women’s Design Service, this project aims to raise the profile of gender issues in the built environment in the context of UK Gender Equality Legislation. Funded by Urban Buzz for 18 months from June 2007 (£127,420), the project involves the development of an on-line database of English-language academic literature, reports, and legislation on gender and the built environment (to be based at www.gendersite.org – not yet live). Dr Clare Melhuish is a postdoctoral research fellow on the project based at QMUL, and is currently compiling the database.

3. Settlement houses: urban residence and reform
By the early twentieth century, Toynbee Hall (London) and Hull-House (Chicago) had inspired an international settlement movement, whereby social reformers lived and worked in poor urban neighbourhoods. I am studying settlement houses and the relationships of gender, class and ‘race’ in the policies and practices of urban residence and reform. To what extent were settlement houses established in cities across the British Empire? What forms of domestic femininity and masculinity were promoted and resisted? How do settlement houses address urban poverty today? Developing from my involvement with the British Academy funded international network on ‘The Urban Atlantic,’ I have conducted initial research in New York and London, and have a paper in press with Environment and Planning A.

Postgraduate supervision:

  • Akile Ahmet ‘Home and identity for young men of mixed descent’
  • Jayani Bonnerjee ‘Placing neighbourhoods and cities in diaspora space: Anglo-Indian and Chinese communities in Calcutta, London and Toronto’
  • Caron Lipman (with Catherine Nash) ‘Co-habiting with ghosts’
  • Joanna Long (with Catherine Nash) ‘Practising identities: home, family and community among Palestinians in Britain’
  • Felicity Paynter ‘Culture-led regeneration and the sustainable development of suburban towns’
  • Subhadra Roy (with Isabel Dyck) ‘Diaspora and transnationality: South Asian women in Britain’
  • Imogen Wallace ‘Home as a site of (in)security for Muslim families in East London’

Publications:

Books

  • Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006) Home. London: Routledge. 304 pp..
  • Blunt, A. (2005) Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Oxford: Blackwell (RGS-IBG Book Series). 288 pp..
  • Blunt, A., Gruffudd, P., May, J., Ogborn, M. and Pinder, D. (eds) (2003) Cultural Geography in Practice. London: Arnold. 330 pp..
  • Blunt, A. and McEwan, C. (eds) (2002) Postcolonial Geographies. London: Continuum. 245 pp..
  • Blunt, A. and Wills, J. (2000) Dissident Geographies: an Introduction to Radical Ideas and Practice. Harlow: Prentice Hall. 212 pp..
  • Blunt, A. (1994) Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York; Guilford. 190 pp..
  • Blunt, A. and Rose, G. (eds.) (1994) Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guilford, 256 pp.

Journal Articles

  • Blunt, A. (in press) ‘The skyscraper settlement: home and residence at Christodora House.’ Environment and Planning A.
  • Blunt, A., Bonnerjee, J., Lipman, C., Long, J. and Paynter, F. (2007) ‘My Home: space, text and performance.’ Cultural Geographies 14: 309-18.
  • Blunt, A. and Varley, A. (2004) ‘Geographies of home: an introduction.’ Cultural Geographies 11: 3-6. Co-editor (with A. Varley) of this special issue on ‘Geographies of Home.’
  • Blunt, A. (2003) ‘Collective memory and productive nostalgia: Anglo-Indian home-making at McCluskieganj.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21: 717-738.
  • Blunt, A. (2003) ‘Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain.’ International Journal of Population Geography 9: 281-294.
  • Blunt, A. (2002) ‘ “Land of our Mothers”: home, identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919-1947.’ History Workshop Journal 54: 49-72.
  • Blunt, A. (2000) ‘Spatial stories under siege: British women writing from Lucknow in 1857.’ Gender, Place and Culture 7: 229-46.
  • Blunt, A. (2000) ‘Embodying war: British women and domestic defilement in the Indian ‘Mutiny,’ 1857-8.’ Journal of Historical Geography 26: 403-28.
  • Blunt, A. (2000) ‘Postcolonial migrations: Anglo-Indians in ‘White Australia.’ International Journal of Anglo-Indian Studies 5 (web-based journal).
  • Blunt, A. (1999) ‘Imperial geographies of home: British women in India, 1886-1925.’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 24, pp. 421-440.

Invited Progress Reports

  • Blunt, A. (2007) ‘Cultural geographies of migration: mobility, transnationality and diaspora.’ Progress in Human Geography 31: 684-94.
  • Blunt, A. (2005) ‘Cultural geographies of home.’ Progress in Human Geography 29: 505-515.


Chapters in Edited Collections

  • Blunt, A. (2006) ‘Home, community and nationality: Anglo-Indian women in India before and after Independence,’ in S. Raju, M. S. Kumar and S. Corbridge (eds.) Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies in India. New Delhi: Sage, pp. 49-69.
  • Blunt, A. (2005) ‘The spatial politics of situatedness: feminist and postcolonial perspectives,’ in E. Engelstad and S. Gerrard (eds.) Challenging Situatedness: Gender, Culture and the Production of Knowledge. Delft: Eburon Academic Publishers, pp. 191-212.
  • Blunt, A. (2005) ‘Colonialism / postcolonialism,’ in D. Sibley, D. Atkinson, P. Jackson and N. Washbourne (eds.) Critical Geographies. London: IB Tauris, pp. 175-181.
  • Blunt, A. (2003) ‘Home and empire: photographs of British women in the Lucknow Album, 1856-7,’ in J. Schwartz and J. Ryan (eds.) Picturing Place: Photography and Imaginative Geography. London: IB Tauris, pp. 243-60.
  • Blunt, A. (2003) ‘Geography and the humanities,’ in S. Holloway, S. Rice and G. Valentine (eds.) Key Concepts in Geography. London: Sage, pp.73-91.
  • Blunt, A. (2003) ‘Home and identity: life stories in text and in person,’ in A. Blunt, P. Gruffudd, J. May, M. Ogborn and D. Pinder (eds.) Cultural Geography in Practice. London: Arnold, pp.71-87.
  • Blunt, A. and McEwan, C. (2002) ‘Introducing Postcolonial Geographies,’ in A. Blunt and C. McEwan (eds.) Postcolonial Geographies (Continuum, London) pp. 1-6.
  • Blunt, A. (1999) ‘“The Flight from Lucknow”: British women travelling and writing home from India, 1857-8,’ in J. Duncan and D. Gregory (eds.) Writes of Passage: Ambiguity and Contradiction in British Colonial and Post-Colonial Travel Writing. London: Routledge, pp. 92-113.
  • Blunt, A. (1994) ‘Mapping authorship and authority: reading Mary Kingsley’s landscape descriptions,’ in A. Blunt and G. Rose (eds.) Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guilford, pp. 51-72.
  • Blunt, A. and Rose, G. (1994) ‘Introduction: women’s colonial and postcolonial geographies,’ in A. Blunt and G. Rose (eds.) Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guilford, pp. 1-25.