Books by Kay Anderson

Kay Anderson is a part-time Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society. She is a leading, internationally recognised scholar in the fields of Cultural Geography and race historiography. Her sole-author book, Race and the Crisis of Humanism (Routledge 2007) won the 2008 NSW Premier's Literary Award for Critical Writing and her award-winningVancouver's Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada 1875-1980(McGill-Queens UP 1991) is in its 5th edition. She is co-editor ofEnvironment: Critical Essays in Human Geography (Ashgate 2008) and the Handbook of Cultural Geography (Sage 2002). She is an editorial board member of various journals includingCultural Geographies, Geographical Research, and City, and section editor on `Cultural and Social Geography' for theEncyclopedia of Human Geography (Elsevier 2009). My research is primarily concerned with the relationship between place and the politics of identity. For example, I have undertaken a series of investigations into the relationship between the city, everyday life and the spatial constitution of power. This work has found outlets in projects such as City A-Z and also a sole authored book, Real Cities: modernity, space and the phantasmagorias of city life. This book makes a case for taking seriously the more imaginary, fantasmatic and emotional aspects of urbanism. Drawing inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel and various psychogeographers, Real Cities explores the dream-like and ghost-like experiences of city life. A further strand of work has been to intervene in how Geography, as a Discipline, is conceived in terms of its practices, content and approaches. My main contribution has been to promote the legitimacy of a psychoanalytic approach to Geography, as first set out in The Body and the City. However, this project has also involved a more cultural take on Geography itself. This can be seen in both the Handbook of Cultural Geography and Patterned Ground. The work I am conducting over the next few years, however, focuses on the body. This project is tentatively titled Fantastic Bodies. It is expected that the final outcome will be a sole authored book. Nigel Thrift is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Bristol. He has co-edited and co-authored numerous books; most recently Writing the Rural: Five Cultural Geographies and Globalisation, Institutions and Regional Development in Europe. Thrift has three co-edited or co-authored books in press The City of London and Social Power in Modern Britain; Diffusing Geography: Essays for Peter Hagget; and Mapping the Subject.