Katherine Brickell joined the Department of Geography as Professor of Urban Studies in January 2023 and is now Research Lead for the department. She was previously Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Katherine’s feminist-oriented research and scholarship on home and domestic life crosscuts urban, social, political, and legal geography. Her books include Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State (2025), Home SOS: Gender, Violence and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia (2020), The Handbook of Displacement (2020), Geographies of Forced Eviction (2017), and Translocal Geographies (2011).

Katherine has eight years of research experience examining the pressing issues of family homelessness and life in Temporary Accommodation for domestic abuse survivors and children in urban centres of England (London, Greater Manchester) and Ireland (Dublin). Together with Mel Nowicki, their debt-focused work on these issues has been supported by the Urban Studies Foundation, British Academy, Wates Family Enterprise Trust, Impact on Urban Health, and People’s Health Trust. Their 2023 report, ‘The Debt Trap’, was launched at the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation (APPG TA) and they are continuing to push for change through their book Debt Trap Nation and associated policy activities (see https://www.debt-trap-nation.org).

Katherine is additionally undertaking research with Rosalie Warnock exploring the experiences of neurodivergent children and their families living in Temporary Accommodation in the UK. As part of the Sensory Lives study supported by the Leverhulme Trust, they have collaborated with the APPG TA, Shared Health Foundation and Autistica to lead the first ever national call for evidence on this topic. The report will be released in late 2025/early 2026.

Katherine also has two decades of research expertise in Cambodia, and is the co-editor of The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (2020). She is committed to collaborative and impactful research and is co-researcher of the scoping report ‘Geographers and Legal Impact’ (Royal Geographical Society, 2022). Katherine is Editor of the flagship disciplinary journal Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2023 ongoing) and was previously Editor of Gender, Place and Culture (2017-2023).

In recognition of research excellence, Katherine was conferred the Gill Memorial Award by the Royal Geographical Society (2014) and the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2016). The Times Higher Education (2020) ‘Research Project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences’ was awarded to the 'Blood Bricks' project she led. Katherine’s monograph Home SOS won the Royal Geographical Society’s Social and Cultural Geography Research Group Prize (2022).

Research

• Home (un)-making, domestic abuse and displacement
• Debt-financed social reproduction
• Feminist legal geography and practice

Katherine has led multiple funded grants on these and other related topics with interdisciplinary teams and external partners:

• (2025-2026, Leverhulme Trust) Sensory Lives: Neurodiverse Children and Families in Temporary Accommodation. https://www.sensorylivesproject.org
• (2023-2024, The British Academy) A Feminist Geography of Debt and Housing Precarity.
• (2022-2023, Urban Studies Foundation) Navigating Debt-Trap Urbanism in Pandemic Times: Family Homelessness and Temporary Accommodation in Greater Manchester.
• (2020-2022, UKRI) Social Protection and the Gendered Impacts of COVID-19 in Cambodia: Longitudinal Research to ‘Build Back Better’ in the Global Garment Industry. www.refashionstudy.org
• (2019-2022, UKRI) Depleted by Debt? Focusing a Gendered Lens on Climate Resilience, Credit, and Nutrition in Translocal Cambodia and South India.
• (2017-2019, UKRI) Blood Bricks: Examining the Climate Change-Modern Slavery Nexus in the Cambodian Construction Industry.
• (2012-2015, UKRI) Lay and Institutional Knowledges of Domestic Violence Law: Towards Active Citizenship in Rural and Urban Cambodia.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 6SSG3091 Geographies of Home

PhD supervision

Katherine is interested in supervising postgraduate research at doctoral level and is happy to discuss research topics and funding avenues with prospective students. She is especially interested in the following areas:

• Feminist geopolitics and feminist political economy
• Gender-based violence and domestic abuse
• Urban displacement and eviction
• Geographies of home and homelessness
• Debt and over-indebtedness
• Legal geography and practice

Further details

See Katherine's research profile