My research focuses on the relationship between culture, space, and technology. My PhD thesis examined the work of the London-based writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair. Drawing heavily on the work of Walter Benjamin, the writings of the Situationist International, and Fredric Jameson, it reads his poetry and prose as an attempt to rediscover writing as a political, socially-oriented praxis in the wake of the failure of the 20th Century avant-gardes to achieve their revolutionary aims.
In addition to my critical scholarship, I have high-level skills in digital humanities methodologies, particularly web-based mapping and data visualisation. I am currently Senior Research Fellow at the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL, I have been lead designer and developer on the Survey of London Whitechapel Initiative, an interdisciplinary project drawing on expertise in architectural history, data visualisation and GIS.
I am currently Principal Investigator for Memory Mapper, an open-source web mapping builds upon learning from the Survey of London Whitechapel project.
In addition to my work at UCL, I have held Research Associate positions at the Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster, and the Sussex Humanities Lab. At Lancaster, I was technical lead on Chronotopic Cartographies, which uses network analysis and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘chronotope’ to generate data visualisations of the spatiality and temporality of the literary text. At Sussex, I was responsible for implementing a linked open data solution for the Tools of Knowledge project.
| 2022 – present | Senior Research Fellow, Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London |
| 2016 – 2022 | Research Fellow, Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London |
| 2021 - 2023 | Research Associate, Sussex Humanities Lab, Sussex University |
| 2018 - 2021 | Research Associate, Department for English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University |
| 2016 - 2019 | Sessional Lecturer, MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments, UCL. |
| 2011 - 2012 | Sessional Lecturer, BA English Literature, University of Manchester |
| 2006 - 2012 | PhD, English Literature, University of Manchester. Thesis title: Form, Place, and Memory: Materialist Readings of Iain Sinclair’s London Writing (completed on a part-time basis). Supervised by Professor Daniela Caselli and Professor Bertrand Taithe. |
| 2001 - 2002 | MA, English Literature and Critical Theory, University of Manchester |
| 2016 - 2019 | Sessional Lecturer, MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments, UCL. |
| 1998 – 2001 | BA (Hons), English Literature, University of Manchester |
| 2020-2023 | with Sally Bushell, James Butler, and Rebecca Hutcheon, Chronotopic Cartographies (https://lancaster.ac.uk/chronotopic-cartographies). Data visualisations and digital tools for literary mapping. Research Associate with responsibility for conceptual design (with other members of the team) and data visualisation using Python and Javascript; website design, UX and code. |
| 2020 | with Peter Guillery, Rachel Lichtenstein, and Laura Vaughan, A Memory Map of the Jewish East End (https://jewisheastendmemorymap.org). Interactive map documenting the history of the Jewish community in East London. Principal Investigator: project management, website design, UX and code. |
| 2019 | with Andy Hudson-Smith, Martin de Jode and Leah Lovett, The Listening Wood / The Living Stone. Two digital installations using IoT technologies designed to engage visitors to Hampstead Heath and Grasmere to engage people with the cultural history of landscape. Co-Investigator: project management, conceptual design. |
| 2018 | with Andy Hudson-Smith and Richard Milton, Tales of the Park. Public facing digital installation designed to engage people with the privacy and security issues surrounding ‘Internet of Things’ technology. Research Associate: research design, UX, and code of IoT deployment. |
| 2016 | with Martin Zaltz Austwick, Peter Guillery, Helen Jones, Sarah Milne, Aileen Reid, Shahed Saleem, Amy Smith and Duncan Smith, Survey of London Whitechapel (https://surveyoflondon.org). Interactive map for the co-production of the histories of the parish of Whitechapel, London. Research Associate: design, UX and code of interactive map/crowdsourcing website. |
| In press | ‘A Walk in the Woods’ in Walking’s New Movements (with Leah Lovett, Martin De Jode, and Andy Hudson-Smith). Charmouth: Triarchy Press. |
| 2012 | Utopia and the 2012 Olympicsʼ, in The Art of Dissent: Adventures in Londonʼs Olympic State ed. Hilary Powell and Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, London: Marshgate. |
| 2010 | ʻReflectionsʼ, in Art and Conflict ed. Lesley Young, Aberystwyth: Literature Across Frontiers. |
| Forthcoming | ‘Towards a Literary Topology’ (with James Butler, Rebecca Hutcheon, Alex Butterworth and Sally Bushell). |
| Forthcoming | ‘Downriver’s Flaneurs’ |
| 2020 | with Leah Lovett, Martin De Jode, and Andy Hudson-Smith, ‘Walking in Tree Time’. Leonardo. |
| 2018 | with Richard Milton, Boyana Buyuklieva, Andy Hudson-Smith and Stephen Gray. ‘Talking to GNOMEs: Exploring Privacy and Trust Around Internet of Things Devices in a Public Space’, in ACM SIGCHI 2018. |
CC BY-NC 4.0 Duncan Hay, 2024.