Stuart Dunn is Professor of Spatial Humanities at King's. He has interests in the history of cartography, digital approaches to landscape studies, and spatial humanities. Between 2019 and 2023 he served as Head of the Department of Digital Humanities. He is on sabbatical leave for the academic year 2023/24.

Stuart is interested in modelling how people, location and place interact, and how those interactions are expressed digitally, for example through the application of GIS to historical placenames and non-extant hierarchical and administrative systems. He is also interested in the theory of abstract spatial semantics and historical gazetteers. Stuart currently works on projects in digital folklore and storytelling, Critical GIS, cultural heritage, and the archaeology of mobility. He works on computational approaches to art history (leading the Ancient Itineraries project), funded by the Getty Foundation), and has interests in digital folklore. Recently he has become interested in the presence and representation of death and funeral rituals in the landscape.

He gained an interdisciplinary PhD on Aegean Bronze Age dating methods and palaeovolcanology from the University of Durham in 2002, conducting fieldwork in Melos, Crete and Santorini. Stuart is also a Guest Professor of Riga Technical University in Latvia, a Foreign Expert at the Digital Publishing and Digital Humanities Research Center of the Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai, a Visiting Scholar of the Centre for Digital Humanities at the Australian National University, and was formerly a Visiting Scholar in Stanford University's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis's Spatial History project.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

Stuart welcomes enquiries about the supervision of PhD projects in any of the following areas:

Digital Geography. The development and application of digital mapping tools, and GIS in the humanities, especially history and archaeology, and geospatial semantics.
Digital Folklore. Mapping funerary geographies and pathways and ritual practices in early modern Europe.
Data visualisation. Especially the relationship between documented human movement, space and location; including theoretical aspects of Virtual Reality and agency theory.
Digital approaches to landscape archaeology. Especially the landscapes of the Aegean and East Mediterranean, and landscape history of sites and monuments in Roman and pre-Roman Britain. I am especially interested in the affordances and limitations of digital mapping in expressing and understanding movement in such landscapes.

For more details, please see Stuart's full research profile. You can find his blog here.

Teaching

As well as the core topics of the Spatial Humanities, Stuart teaches the history, theory and origins of the Internet and World Wide Web, and topics in digital cultural heritage, introducing students to the basis of Geographical Information Systems (GIS). This takes in perspectives on gazetteers, neogeography, and the geographies of the Ancient World. He has taught as an external professor in Latvia, and on the PhD programme of the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy.

Expertise and public engagement

Stuart was a speaker at the London Month of the Dead Festival in October 2023.

Selected publications

2022: Networking the Archive: The Stories and Structures of Thos. Agnew's Stock Books L Noble, V Vavassori, A Crookham, S Dunn ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) 15 (1), 1-14.
2021: Linking text and maps: Annotation as a critical tool for teaching in the Spatial Humanities S Dunn, V Vitale Literary Geographies 7 (2), 292-310.
2020: Routledge International Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities K Schuster, S Dunn Routledge.
2019: A History of Place in the Digital Age. Routledge.

Professor Stephen Whiteman

Events

Events

The Digital Futures of History

Events

The Digital Futures of History