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Professor Stuart Dunn

Professor of Spatial Humanities

Biography

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.

    Research

    DmKn_1mW4AA0cZR
    Ancient Itineraries

    This programme seeks to explore how 'Digital' methods apply to art history through two meetings: one at King's and one in Athens.

    Project status: Completed

    CDC header
    Centre for Digital Culture

    The Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London is an interdisciplinary research centre promoting research and debate on digital culture

    Screenshot 2022-12-14 at 11.06.05
    Computational Humanities Research Group

    Computational Humanities research group

    News

    Digital Futures Institute to help 'understand what it means to live well with technology'

    A new institute, due to launch publicly in April, will investigate the relationship between humans and the technologies that have helped extend our capacities...

    DFI Story

    King's launch next Career Accelerator in UX Design

    King’s has launched a new Career Accelerator Programme in UX Design, in partnership with digital education company FourthRev, with applications now open.

    KCL UX Design

    King's appoints new Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities

    Joanna Zylinska has been appointed as Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice in the Department of Digital Humanities.

    Joanna-Zylinska

    Eleven new King's Artists projects exploring the theme of 'Intelligence'

    The 2021 King’s Artists cohort will be exploring the theme of ‘Intelligence’ in eleven new collaborative R&D projects across four King’s College London...

    Grey logo sign resembling an eye over a blue map of the Strand

    New King's Institute in Digital Art History awarded grant support from the Getty Foundation

    New King's Institute in Digital Art History awarded grant support from the Getty Foundation and call-to-action for prospective members of the new Institute.

    Bush House

    Call for members: Major new Institute opens at King's College London with Getty Foundation support

    Call for members of King's College London's new Institute in Digital Art History, funded by the Getty Foundation

    Call for Members

    Events

    20JunThe Spatial Humanities

    The Spatial Humanities: a challenge to the all-knowing map

    In this lecture Professor Stuart Dunn will explore the origins of our motivation to “know” the entire world through mapping.

    Please note: this event has passed.

      Research

      DmKn_1mW4AA0cZR
      Ancient Itineraries

      This programme seeks to explore how 'Digital' methods apply to art history through two meetings: one at King's and one in Athens.

      Project status: Completed

      CDC header
      Centre for Digital Culture

      The Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London is an interdisciplinary research centre promoting research and debate on digital culture

      Screenshot 2022-12-14 at 11.06.05
      Computational Humanities Research Group

      Computational Humanities research group

      News

      Digital Futures Institute to help 'understand what it means to live well with technology'

      A new institute, due to launch publicly in April, will investigate the relationship between humans and the technologies that have helped extend our capacities...

      DFI Story

      King's launch next Career Accelerator in UX Design

      King’s has launched a new Career Accelerator Programme in UX Design, in partnership with digital education company FourthRev, with applications now open.

      KCL UX Design

      King's appoints new Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities

      Joanna Zylinska has been appointed as Professor of Media Philosophy and Critical Digital Practice in the Department of Digital Humanities.

      Joanna-Zylinska

      Eleven new King's Artists projects exploring the theme of 'Intelligence'

      The 2021 King’s Artists cohort will be exploring the theme of ‘Intelligence’ in eleven new collaborative R&D projects across four King’s College London...

      Grey logo sign resembling an eye over a blue map of the Strand

      New King's Institute in Digital Art History awarded grant support from the Getty Foundation

      New King's Institute in Digital Art History awarded grant support from the Getty Foundation and call-to-action for prospective members of the new Institute.

      Bush House

      Call for members: Major new Institute opens at King's College London with Getty Foundation support

      Call for members of King's College London's new Institute in Digital Art History, funded by the Getty Foundation

      Call for Members

      Events

      20JunThe Spatial Humanities

      The Spatial Humanities: a challenge to the all-knowing map

      In this lecture Professor Stuart Dunn will explore the origins of our motivation to “know” the entire world through mapping.

      Please note: this event has passed.