Social and Cultural Geography

Social & Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway (SCG) has played a major role in the development of the subject internationally over the last twenty years. The Group has a distinctive record of research in the arts and humanities as well as the social sciences. 

SCG organizes a lively programme of events, including seminars, workshops and field visits. The Group runs a well-established postgraduate workshop series Landscape Surgery at Royal Holloway’s centre in Bloomsbury.

SCG has supported influential research projects on place, landscape and mobility, creative and collaborative geographies, transnational material cultures, visual cultures of exploration, print culture and travel, hospitality and multi-culturalism and urban modernities. SCG values both empirical and theoretically-informed research in a variety of contexts, contemporary and historical.

SCG is home to a large and intellectually vibrant postgraduate community.  We supervise at any one time around 40-50 PhD students, many funded by national and international scholarships. In the period 2008-2012, 26 PhD theses were completed on a wide variety of topics.

The Group runs the successful MA in Cultural Geography (Research). We also welcome visiting students from overseas. Many of our former students are now established academics in Universities all over the world. 

SCG has developed collaborations with a variety of leading institutions in the UK cultural sector, including the Science Museum, V&A Museum, National Maritime Museum, Museum of London, British Library, British Museum, Natural History Museum, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the RGS-IBG.

SCG has pioneered collaborations with creative practitioners, as artists in residence, postgraduate researchers, research fellows and participants in AHRC-funded research projects. 

Key journals in the field, including cultural geographies and the Journal of Historical Geography, are edited from Royal Holloway.