Dr Alex Loftus

Biography

Dr Alex Loftus joined King’s in 2012 after spending 7 years at Royal Holloway as an RCUK Academic Fellow and then Lecturer in Geography. Prior to that, he studied at the University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University (Ontario) and the University of Oxford.

Alex completed his DPhil at the latter, focusing on the political ecology of water in South Africa, while also teaching as a College Lecturer at St Peter’s College from 2004-2005. Having spent most of his life in a range of different Geography departments, he's grown to love the openness of the discipline.

Alex is currently part of the editorial collective for the journal Antipode and sits on the editorial boards of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Environmental Values, Geoforum, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) and, the Journal of Political Ecology.

He is the Treasurer of the IJURR Foundation and has served as an external examiner for Masters programmes at University College London and the University of Manchester. At King’s, he chairs the Contested Development research domain.

Research

• Political ecology 
• Urban political ecology 
• The right to water
• Marxism as a philosophy of praxis 
• Financialisation

Alex's research addresses questions in political ecology, ranging from debates over water privatisation (his MA research at Queen’s), to struggles over water in post-apartheid South Africa (his doctoral research), around the right to water (a co-edited book with Farhana Sultana) and more recently debates over the financialisation of water infrastructure (with Hug March and Tom Purcell).

More broadly, Alex has sought to reframe political ecological questions through a philosophy of praxis as articulated through the work of Antonio Gramsci (with Mike Ekers, Gillian Hart and Stefan Kipfer).

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 4SSG1014 Geographical Foundations I: the making of the modern world
• 4SSG1016 Geography in Action
• 5SSG2047 Geography Field Research in Human Geography (field trip to San Francisco)
• 5SSG2061 Geographical Research Skills

Postgraduate

• 7SSG5147 Globalisation and the Environment

PhD supervision

Over the last 14 years, Alex has supervised 12 students to successful completion and is currently supervising a further 8 students. Details of the students he's currently working with can be found on his PURE profile.

Further details

See Alex's research profile