Prof Robert Mayhew

BA, DPhil(Oxon), PhD(Cantab)

Professor of Historical Geography and Intellectual History

Contact

Office: 2.19n
Tel: +44 (0)117 331 7307
Fax: +44 (0)117 9287878
Email: robert.mayhew@bristol.ac.uk

Research interests

I was an undergraduate and graduate student in the School of Geography at the University of Oxford, a (then) wonderful place which tolerated my eccentricities, whilst the good offices of my tutors at Hertford College and especially Jack Langton at St John's College downright encouraged me to think and pursue my interests wherever the might lead me. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven.”

I then held a British Academy research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, another centre of spirited and independent thought long associated with a scholarly and humane understanding of the task of the geographer, before moving to a lectureship at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1999. I moved to a Readership in Historical Geography here in Bristol in 2005. I was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2007 and was made Professor of Historical Geography and Intellectual History in 2008. I am the book reviews editor for H-Net's historical geography network and also edit the monograph series “Studies in Historical Geography” for IB Tauris.

My main areas of research interest are twofold. First, deriving from my doctoral work in Oxford, I am interested in the ways in which landscape was represented in English literature. I have sought to show in a number of articles the extent to which landscape was a theological category in eighteenth century thought. This work has led me to write about a range of canonical authors in the “long” eighteenth century including Addison, Pope, Fielding, Gilpin and Radcliffe.My main focus, however, has been on the work of Samuel Johnson, and this has resulted in a monograph with Palgrave, Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 (2004).

Second, my interest in the eighteenth century led me to a concern with the history of geography in early modern England. This was the main project I pursued during my time in Cambridge and has been my main area of research ever since. I have concentrated on seventeenth and eighteenth century British geographical writings for the most part, with some excursions into the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, this range being fully exemplified in a monograph on the topic, Enlightenment Geography (2000).

At present, I am engaged actively in work in two main arenas. First, I am writing a book length study of geography's interactions with the humanities tradition of scholarship over the period from ancient times to 1945. This project is an attempt both to extend the chronological range we normally think about as geographers and to redirect attention to the extent to which geography was a scholarly enterprise entwined with the main trunk of the European humanistic tradition. Secondly, my long held and entirely unhealthy obsession with footnotes has broadened into an increasing interest in seeing geography as a textual tradition where we need to analyse the relations between authors, publishers and readers to understand the genealogy of this form of inquiry.

Selected publications

Elizabeth Baigent & Mayhew, RJ. '"Geography as part of a problematic, not an intergral discipline": a personal and intellectual biography of Jack Langton', in Elizabeth Baigent and Robert Mayhew (Eds.), English Geographies 1600-1950: Historical Essays on English Customs, Cultures and Communities in Honour of Jack Langton, (pp. 4-22), St John's College Oxford Research Centre, 2009. ISBN: 9780954497569

Mayhew, RJ. '"These Trees Shall be My Books": Forests as a Geographical Imaginary in English Literature, c.1600-1800', in Elizabeth Baigent and Robert Mayhew (Eds.), English Geographies 1600-1950: Historical Essays on English Customs, Cultures and Communities in Honour of Jack Langton, (pp. 39-57), St John's College Oxford Research Centre, 2009. ISBN: 9780954497569

Mayhew, RJ. 'Peter Heylyn (1599-1662)', in Hayden Lorimer and Charles W.J. Withers (Eds.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, 28, (pp. 1-16), Continuum, 2009. ISBN: 9780826437525

Elizabeth Baigent & Mayhew, RJ (Eds.). English Geographies 1600-1950: Historical Essays on English Customs, Cultures and Communities in Honour of Jack Langton, St John's College Oxford Research Centre, 2009. ISBN: 9780954497569