Geography research areas
The University of Nottingham is a leading research university, and the School of Geography has a strong international research profile.
Individual postgraduate research projects may of course cross over between research groups, for example in fields such as environmental management, and students may have supervisors drawn from more than one group. You are welcome to contact potential supervisors directly by email to discuss your research ideas.
Postgraduate research in the School is funded by UK government research councils, including AHRC, ESRC, and NERC, by governments of other countries, commercial and non-governmental organisations, and from within the University of Nottingham itself. Scholarships funded by the School are normally advertised each year.
Contaminated Land Management MRes (100% online)
Duration : 2 years part-time
The course is aimed at professional advisors from government, consultancies and regulators from anywhere in the world. The course is delivered in four modules (Site Characterisation, Risk Assessment, Remediation and Urban Regeneration) and a dissertation. Modules are delivered 100 per cent online by pre-recorded interactive lectures, live webinars and one-to-one online tutorials and project supervision supported by distance learning and web-based training materials, as well as directed reading. If you want to master the complex multi-disciplinary area of contaminated land management, then this is the programme for you.
Cultural and Historical Geography
This well-established research theme represents a form of geographical enquiry related to wider developments in the arts and humanities. Researchers in this area have been particularly successful in undertaking collaborative projects within and beyond the School, securing substantial grants from research council and charitable trusts (AHRC, ESRC, Leverhulme and Wellcome) to fund research staff, and attracting postgraduate students, a number of whom have taken up important posts elsewhere.
Research focuses on:
- Cultural representations of landscape and environment
Patterns and processes of historical geographical change
- Histories of geographical and environmental knowledge
Environment and Society
This research theme focuses on the expertise developed within Environmental and Geomorphological Sciences. Research seeks to apply this knowledge to solve environmental problems in a variety of geographical contexts in both the developed and developing world. The creation of the Centre for Environmental Management, a discrete but integral component of the School, provides a new institutional focus for the School’s policy driven, applied environmental research, including management and control of air and water pollution; sustainability thresholds and countryside policy; flood management and prevention; rural landscape and countryside management; and the political economy of natural resource management. Contaminated land management forms another prominent research dimension in the theme.
Geographical Information Science
Research focuses on Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Geospatial Intelligence, Earth Observation and Digital Terrain Modelling. Research in the field of Earth Observation includes the development of methodologies and algorithms for exploiting data from new earth-observation sensors, such as ultra-high spatial resolution imagery, LIDAR and SAR for land-cover classification and feature extraction. GIS research has included the analysis of crime records, spatial epidemiology, crop yield prediction, visualisation of natural and urban landscapes, and neural networks.
New Economic Geographies
Research focuses on theoretical and empirical issues in contemporary economic geography, including the importance of culture in the analysis of economic phenomena, and the impact of new forms of electronic communication and distribution. Particular opportunities arise for research in the geographies of money and finance, consumption and commodity chains, and the music industry. There is also a regional emphasis in research on economic transition in China, Russia and Eastern Europe.
Environmental and Geomorphological Sciences
Research focuses on river management, sediment transport and channel morphology, climate change indicators, drylands geomorphology and landscape ecology. There is also a strong emphasis on the modelling of environmental dynamics (forced and natural) over a range of time scales through the Quaternary and Holocene.
The School of Geography has a commitment to e-learning and has allocated resources accordingly to manage and implement interactive online materials. At present the School has a number of undergraduate modules with online support and envisages that within a short period of time this will be extended to the majority of postgraduate courses.
For more information contact: