Skip to main content
School of Geography

Dr Archie Davies

Archie

Senior Lecturer in Geography and Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences

Email: a.davies@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Geography Building, Room 221
Twitter: @AOJDavies
Office Hours: Mondays 230-330 (Room 221), Tuesday 230-330 (online).

Profile

I am cultural and historical geographer working across the fields of political ecology and the history and philosophy of geography. 

The first major theme of my research addresses food, hunger, nature, race, and embodiment. In this strand of my work, I have written about the coloniality of infrastructure, the racial division of nature, the history of landscape thinking, and the idea of socio-ecological metabolism. I am now taking this work forward through research projects on the history of meat extract, Oxo and Bovril, and the historical geography of painkillers.

My second main research area is the history of twentieth century geographical ideas in Latin America, particularly the Northeast of Brazil. My first book, A World Without Hunger: Josué de Castro and the history of geography (Liverpool, 2023), tells the story of Josué de Castro (1908-73), a Brazilian activist, politician and geographer. I follow Castro from his hometown of Recife to the Brazilian Congress, the UN, and the radical worlds of post-1968 Paris. I investigate how his ideas emerged and travelled, and how his work can help us think about hunger and geography today.

I am a research-led translator from Portuguese to English. I have translated Milton Santos’ 1978 classic work of critical geography, For a New Geography, and am working with Christen Smith and Bethânia Gomes to translate the writing of the Brazilian Black feminist activist and writer Beatriz Nascimento. 

I received an MSc in Urban Studies from University College London in 2015, and a PhD from King’s College London in 2019, supervised by Alex Loftus. In 2019-20 I was a Visiting Stipendiary Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London. From April 2020 I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Geography in Sheffield, and I joined QMUL in September 2022.

Teaching

Cultural Geographies, Independent Geographical Study 

Research

Research Interests:

Political ecology, translation, the history of geography, hunger, embodiment, pain, race, Brazilian geography, the Northeast of Brazil, infrastructure, meat production, colonialism, landscape. 

Publications

A World Without Hunger: Josué de Castro and the History of Geography (Liverpool 2023, open access through Knowledge Unlatched) 

For a New Geography (translation), by Milton Santos (Minnesota 2021) 

Landscape semaphore: Seeing mud and mangroves in the Brazilian Northeast, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021 

Unwrapping the OXO Cube: Josué de Castro and the intellectual history of metabolism, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019 

“In Front of the World”: Translating Beatriz Nascimento, with C Smith and B Gomes - Antipode, 2021 

The racial division of nature: Making land in Recife, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2021 

The coloniality of infrastructure: Engineering, landscape and modernity in Recife, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021 

The body as infrastructure, with L Andueza, A Loftus, H Schling - Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021 

Interventions in Adolescent Lives in Africa Through Story. With Boehmer E & Kawanu Z Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2021 

Milton Santos: The conceptual geographer and the philosophy of technics, Progress in Human Geography, 2019 

Interpellation and Urban transformation: Lisbon's sardine subjects, with A Brooks - Social & Cultural Geography, 2021 

The politics and geopolitics of translation. The multilingual circulation of knowledge and transnational histories of geography: an anglophone perspective, Terra Brasilis (Nova Série), 2021

Public Engagement

Podcast: https://newbooksnetwork.com/for-a-new-geography 

Editor, Latin American Geographies – UK blog: https://lagukinfo.wixsite.com/lag-uk/blog 

Back to top