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 School of Geography and the Environment

People


The programme is steered by a coordinating committee, chaired by Dr Patricia Daley. The Committee represents different disciplines, including life sciences, social sciences and history, and includes both tenured staff and post-doctoral researchers.

Currently, key African Environment staff include the Trapnell Fellow in African Terrestrial Ecology.

African Environments Steering Committee

Steering Committee Profiles

Chair: Dr Patricia Daley
Dr Daley is a University Lecturer in the School of Geography and the Environment, Official Fellow, Geography Tutor and Tutor for Admissions at Jesus College and Lecturer at Pembroke College. Previously, she held appointments at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and at Loughborough University, where she taught human geography topics as well as specialist courses on Africa. Her principal research interests are with reference to Africa and focus on processes of forced migration, environmental change, gender and livelihood strategies, and ethnicity, conflict and peacemaking in Eastern and Central Africa. Recently she has developed a research interest in African communities in Great Britain, focusing on their distribution, settlement, identity and trans-racial fostering.


Dr David Anderson
Dr Anderson, University Lecturer in African Studies at St Antony's College, is a specialist on the History and Politics of eastern Africa. Previously he was the Director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of London. He was the Evans-Pritchard Lecturer at All Souls, Oxford, in 2003 and teaches a masters course on violence and conflict. He has recently published Eroding the Commons: The Politics of Ecology in Kenya (2002), and Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (2004). A forthcoming book, Colonial Crimes: Race, Gender and Justice in Kenya, deals with legislation under criminal law. His recent research has also included analysis of aid, development and ownership in Africa. He is now engaged in a project on drugs in Africa, beginning with a study of the transnational marketing and consumption of khat. In 2005, he will visit the University of Princeton as a Stewart Fellow in the humanities.

Professor William Beinart
Professor Beinart, Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, researches and teaches on southern African history and politics, as well as environmental history. He is chair of the University African Studies Centre, based at St Antony's College. Recent research interests include natural resource management, invader species and land degradation within a socio-economic context in South Africa. He is also researching on the history of environmental sciences and vetinerary medicine and co-ordinates a project on the latter at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine. He edited, with JoAnn McGregor, a volume entitled Social History and African Environments (2003), from the St Antony's conference on African Environments: Past and Present. A second edition of Twentieth-Century South Africa (2001) and a book on The Rise of Conservation in South Africa, 1770-1950 (2003) have been published by OUP. He is currently working on an overview of Environment and Empire and on an environmental history of prickly pear (opuntia) in South Africa.

Dr John Boardman
Dr Boardman is the Deputy Director of the Environmental Change Institute (ECI), Director of the ECI’s MSc in ‘Environmental Change and Management’, a Research Fellow at Green College, and Reader in Geomorphology and Land Degradation in the School of Geography and the Environment. He is a geomorphologist educated at the Universities of Keele (BA and DSc) and London (BSc and PhD) and has published over 100 papers mainly on land degradation, with several edited books: Soils and Quaternary Landscape Evolution (Wiley1985), Periglacial Processes and Landforms in Britain and Ireland (CUP1987), Soil Erosion on Agricultural Land (Wiley 1990), Modelling Soil Erosion by Water (Springer 1998), Soil Erosion and Climate Change (Imperial College Press, 2005) and Soil Erosion in Europe (Wiley, forthcoming). He was Chairman of the EU-funded COST Action 623 ‘Soil Erosion and Global Change’ (1998-2003) with 21 participating countries and now Chairs a Working Group in COST 634 ‘On and Off-Site Impacts of Runoff and Erosion’. His main research interest is land degradation in South Africa, with a project in the Karoo

Dr Neil Chalmers
Neil Chalmers is a biologist, trained at Oxford and Cambridge Universities with a research career in the field of behavioural ecology, based on studies of primates, principally in East Africa and Brazil. After a number of years spent as a lecturer in Zoology at the University of East Africa, he joined the Open University in Britain, in 1970, shortly after its foundation. During the 18 years that he spent at the University, he continued his research career and at the same time became heavily involved in the problem of making science accessible to lay-people using a wide variety of media and education techniques. He also became increasingly involved in management issues, finishing his time at the University as Dean of Science, before becoming Director of The Natural History Museum in November 1988. While at the Museum, Neil Chalmers worked to strengthen the impact and standing of its science, and to make it more accessible and useful to a wide variety of audiences. These included the international research community, politicians and decision-makers and the visiting public. He led a major redevelopment of the Museum's exhibitions; he emphasised that all Museum visitors should receive a high standard of care, and, through the Darwin Centre, he brought the Museum's science into the public arena in a new way. Sir Neil retired from the Museum in August 2004 and moved to Oxford University to become Warden of Wadham College.

Dr Jan-George Deutsch
Dr Deutsch is a University Lecturer in Commonwealth History at St Cross College. He works on the social and economic history of Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is completing a book on the end of slavery in East Africa and has current interests in Zanzibar.

Professor Andrew Goudie
Professor Goudie was Professor of Geography and a Fellow of Hertford College from 1984 to 2003. A distinguished physical geographer, he was awarded the DSc by the University in 2002, a Royal Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 1991, the Prize of the Royal Belgian Academy for 2002 and has been elected President designate of the International Association of Geomorphologists. He has recently been President of the Geographical Association , President of Section E of the British Association, and Chairman of the British Geomorphological Research Group. He is currently Vice Chairman of the International Association of Geomorphologists, and was a member of the Fund Raising Advisory group for the Royal Geographical Society. He is a Delegate of the Oxford University Press and a former Pro-Vice Chancellor. Professor Goudie became Master of St. Cross College, Oxford in October 2003, but continues to lecture at the School of Geography and the Environment. His main research interests include desert geomorphology, dust storms, weathering, climatic change in the tropics, and the impacts of humans on the environment, with an interest in dryland Africa. He has written numerous influential academic papers and books, including The History of the Study of Landforms, regional geomorphology of the world's deserts for the OUP and an Encyclopaedia of Geomorphology for the IAG.

Professor Katherine Homewood
Katherine Homewood is Professor and Head of Department in Anthropology at University College, London. Her Human Ecology Research group integrates natural and social sciences approaches to conservation/development interactions, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and she edited their 2005 volume on Local Livelihoods And Rural Resources in Africa. She has specialised particularly on land use, livelihoods change and wildlife conservation in East African rangelands, and publishes on this in both natural and social sciences journals. Her forthcoming book deals with the Ecology of African pastoralist societies and she is co-editing a volume on Livelihoods and Land use change in Maasailand. She has directed several European Union- and DFID-funded international collaborative research programmes in East and West Africa and supervised 22 PhD students working in a dozen African countries.

Professor Diana Liverman
Professor Liverman joined the University of Oxford as Director of the Environmental Change Institute and Professor of Environmental Science in the School of Geography and Environment in October 2003. Previous appointments include Director of the Center for Latin American Studies and Interim Dean of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Arizona, Associate Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, and Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds degrees from University College London, the University of Toronto and UCLA. Professor Liverman has served as chair of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change and of the Latin American Studies Association Environment section, as co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Inter-American Institute for Global Change, and as a member of advisory committees for NASA, NOAA and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. She is a member of editorial boards of the Annual Review of Environment and Resources and of Climatic Change. Her research has focused on environmental change and policy, including climate change and its impacts, the social causes and consequences of land use change, and environmental management in the context of globalization. Fellowships and awards include the Mitchell prize in sustainable development, an SSRC/MacArthur fellowship in International Peace and Security, and a visiting fellowship at the UCSD Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. Numerous publications include the books World Regions in Global Context (Prentice Hall 2001, co-authored with Sallie Marston and Paul Knox) and papers on climate variability in the Journal of Climate and in Climate Research (2002); on adaptation to drought in Natural Resources Journal (1999); and on global environmental issues in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1999).

Professor David MacDonald
Professor Macdonald is WildCRU’s director at Tubney House and, inter alia, A.D. White Professor at Cornell University, Chairman of the IUCN/SSC Canid Specialist Group, Vice-President of the RSPCA and the Wildlife Trusts and on the Council of the Zoological Society of London and English Nature. He is a Reader in the Department of Zoology and Research Fellow, with interests in conservation and ecology. Professor Macdonald founded WildCRU in 1986, at the same time Britain’s first University-based research fellowship in wildlife conservation was established. The Unit aims to span the gulf between academic theory and practical problem solving to tackle the emerging biodiversity crisis. Members have come from than 30 countries and many have returned to hold influential roles in conservation, with over 45 doctoral theses completed in the centre, 100 collaborations have been fostered and more than 300 scientific papers and 25 reports have published. The Unit’s research is used to advise policy-makers.

Professor Peter Mitchell

Prof Mitchell is Professor of African Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and a Fellow of St Hugh's College. Before returning to Oxford in 1995, he taught at the Universities of Lampeter and Cape Town and has travelled widely in Africa. Longstanding research interests include using data from archaeological excavations to reconstruct past environmental conditions and investigating the impact of late Quaternary palaeoenvironmental change on human societies in Africa. He has developed these interests in his own fieldwork in Lesotho, which emphasises the study of Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers over the past 25,000 years. Past and present doctoral students have worked, or are currently working, in Kenya, Lesotho, Mali, Niger, South Africa, Swaziland and Zambia, many of them researching the mutual relations between environmental change and precolonial settlement-subsistence patterns. President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists from 2004-06 and now Hon. Secretary of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, he serves on the editorial boards of several leading journals, including Antiquity, the Journal of African History, the South African Archaeological Bulletin and World Archaeology. Recent books include The Archaeology of Southern Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and African Connections: Archaeological Perspectives on Africa and the Wider World (AltaMira Press, 2004). He is currently completing a coauthored synthesis of the archaeology of Africa's hominin and hunter-gatherer past to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Dr Henny Osbahr

Dr Henny Osbahr is a Tyndall Research Fellow at Oxford Tyndall Centre, working on international development and climate change in Africa. Recent consultancy includes the EU project on 'linking climate change adaptation and disaster risk management for sustainable poverty reduction' as part of VARG phase II. Previously, Henny worked as a Research Officer to the African Environments Programme and as a Senior Research Associate on the 'Adaptive' Project, exploring livelihood adaptation to climate change in Southern Africa, at University of Oxford, University of Sheffield, and Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA. She has a PhD in Geography from UCL on sustainable rural livelihood strategies and natural resource management in West Africa.

Professor David Thomas
Professor Thomas was elected Professor of Geography and a Professorial Fellow of Hertford College in 2004. Previously he was a Professor at the University of Sheffield and Director of The Sheffield Centre for International Drylands Research. He is Vice President of the Royal Geographical Society (2002-5), was Chair of the British Geomorphological Research Group (2002-3) and sat on Royal Society and Geological Society committees. Professor Thomas is Director of the CHANGES (Carbon, Hydrology and Global Environmental Systems) research collaborative funded by UNESCO, ICSU, IUGS, and IGCP, principal investigator of the ADAPTIVE project (societal adaptations to climate change, funded the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research) and leader of IGCP project 500 (Dryland change, past present future). He is Geography and Earth Sciences editor of the Journal of Arid Environments and is on the editorial book of a number of other journals and book series. His research interests have generated working links with scientists in many countries, with links to South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Mozambique particularly active at present. He has supervised 15 PhDs to successful completion at Sheffield, and currently supervises 10 D.Phil. students at Oxford. Current research interests are Quaternary environmental changes in African drylands (funding from NERC, The Royal Society and UNESCO), society-environment interactions in arid and semi-arid regions, land degradation and change, natural resource use and adaptation to climate change. Work on adaptation to climate change is also now addressing landscape responses in the low latitudes. This is combining models derived from dune dynamics process studies, climate modelling and ecosystem dynamics.

Dr Richard Washington
Dr Washington is a University Lecturer at the School of Geography and the Environment and Fellow of Keble College. He taught for several years at the University of Natal and University of Cape Town. His broad research interests are climate change and variability although much of his work is centred on the climate of Africa, particularly rainfall predictability. He has been a member of the World Climate Research Programme's scientific steering committee on African Climate Science (CLIVAR-VACS) for the last three years and has led the development of the CLIVAR African Climate Atlas. Dr Washington led a study commissioned by DFID and DEFRA in 2004 on African climate that will inform UK, EU and G8 policy. His is also PI on a recent project assessing the role of seasonal forecasting in adaptation to climate change on longer time scales. The project is funded by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He has lived in Africa for 30 years and travelled to more than 30 African countries. He will be part of the Royal Geographical Society funded field experiment in Chad in February and March 2005. This experiment aims to quantify conditions which lead to the Djourab being the world's premier source of mineral aerosols.

Research Officer: Hassan Sachedina
Hassan Sachedina is a final year DPhil Student registered at the School of Geography and current Research Officer of the African Environments Programme. Born in Kenya, he has lived in Africa for 23 years. Prior to joining AEP, he worked as Senior Technical Design Officer for African Wildlife Foundation in Kenya and Tanzania (2001-2006), Technical Adviser to the Laikipia Wildlife Forum in Kenya (2000-2001) and Project Coordinator of the Selous Rhino Trust in the Selous Game Reserve, Tanzania (1998-2000). Hassan has 10 years professional work experience in natural resource management, sustainable rural livelihoods and non-profit management in Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, Uganda and Rwanda. He is a Graduate Research Fellow of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) based in Nairobi, Kenya and Biodiversity Coordinator for East Africa for the Global Initiative for Traditional Systems (GIFTS) of Health, Institute of Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. Hassan gained a BA in Environmental Studies and French from Middlebury College, USA and graduated with an MSc in Environmental Change and Management from the Environmental Change Institute in 1998. Hassan’s PhD research project in Economic Geography focuses on the socio-economic impacts of conservation on Maasai communities in the Tarangire ecosystem of northern Tanzania. This study involves an analysis of community-park relationships, pastoral livelihood diversification, and the impacts of wildlife based tourism revenue on land use change.