Professor Stuart Dunn

Biography

Stuart Dunn is Professor of Spatial Humanities at King's. He started out as an archaeologist, with interests in the history of cartography, digital approaches to landscape studies, and spatial humanities.

He currently works on projects in spatial narrative theory, critical GIS, Cypriot cultural heritage, and the archaeology of mobility. Stuart 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.

In 2006 he became a Research Associate at the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre, having previously worked at the AHRC, after which he became a Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities. He is also a Visiting Scholar in Stanford University's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis's Spatial History project.

Stuart welcomes enquiries about the supervision of PhD projects in any of the areas above. You can find his blog at http://www.stuartdunn.wordpress.com/about.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Digital Geography. The development and application of digital mapping tools, and GIS in the humanities, especially history and archaeology, and geospatial semantics.
• 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.

I am interested in how people, location and place interact, and how those interactions can be expressed digitally. This can manifest itself in a practical way, i.e. the application of GIS to historical placenames and non-extant hierarchical and administrative systems; but I am also interested in the theory of abstract spatial semantics.

I also research the perception, representation and interpretation of past environments, and how these can be reconstituted digitally, without imposing arbitrary constructs that are not, or cannot, be supported by empirical data. I also have research interests in the development and deployment of social media and web services for scholars in the digital humanities. Stuart welcomes applications for PhD topics related to any of his research interests.

 For more details, please see his full research profile. 

Teaching

I teach the history, theory and origins of the Internet and World Wide Web. This takes in network theory and the history of digital connectivity; and the theory and practice of spatial humanities, including introducing students to the basis of operational Geographical Information Systems (GIS). This takes in perspectives on gazetteers, neogeography, and the geographies of the Ancient World.

I also teach subjects related to the connection between the physical and digital worlds, and digital museums.