Dave Mclaughlin

I am a literary geographer with an interest in helping students engage with geography as a discipline and with developing the 'humanities' end of geography. I completed an AHRC-funded PhD at Cambridge University in 2018. I have taught human geography and social science methods at the Brunel, LSE, Reading, York and Coventry. I am an editor of Literary Geographies, a book review editor of Social and Cultural Geography, and an associate editor of Transfers.

My research focuses on more-than-representational approaches to understand the performative nature of literary reading and writing and its role in co-producing communities, identities and spaces. I have published in Literary Geographies, Social and Cultural Geography, cultural geographies, and Transfers, as well as edited collections published with Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan and Bristol University Press.

I am currently writing a book for University of Wales Press's Literary Geography: Theory and Practice series, which tells the story of the steady transformation of the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes from a ‘nostalgic country of the mind’ into a space which blurs the boundaries of actual and fictional. This transformation was driven by the collaborative, geographically-attuned reading practices of Sherlockians in the late-twentieth century. In telling this tale, it provides an explanation of the development and meaning of literary geography’s key theories and practices for lay and academic audiences. 

I teach on the following modules:

ENV-4010Y Geographical Perspectives (module organiser)

DEV-4011B Geographies of an Unequal World

ENV-4004Y Research and Field Skills

ENV-5040A Social Research Skills (module organiser from Sept. 2023)

ENV-6021Y Independent Research Project (supervisor)

ENV-6031B Environmental Consultancy

ENV-6032A Human Geography in the Anthropocene

ENV-7119Y Research Skills