Skip to main content
School of Geography

Professor Catherine Nash

Catherine

Professor of Human Geography

Email: c.nash@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 8924
Room Number: Geography Building, Room 122

Profile

I am a feminist cultural geographer with research interests in geographies of kinship. In my work I bring a critical geographical perspective to my focus on kinship of different kinds. This includes attention to genealogical knowledges and imaginations (of ancestry, descent and origins) and practices of making relations. I explore the implications of the figuring, ordering and making of relations for accounts of human collective identities (especially national, ethnic and racialised categories of identity and difference) and the significance of breed for human-companion animal relations and animal lives.


Most recently I have begun extend my work on the potency and political implications of kinship by considering the turn to indigenous kinship thinking in a time of the earth crisis and in hope for a post-capitalist world.


This is part of my contribution to engaging with the value and risks of hope through the Critical Hope Collective that I established in June 2024 and co-convene.

Previous research:

 

Geographies of relatedness in population genetics and popular genealogy: Initially funded by an ESRC Research Fellowship (2004-7), this work addresses what I describe as geographies of relatedness in contemporary accounts of shared and differentiated descent in popular genealogy, genetic ancestry testing and in human population genetics. This work was published as two books:  Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy and the Politics of Belonging (Syracuse University Press, 2008) and Genetic Geographies: The Trouble with Ancestry (Minnesota University Press, 2015).

This work was  paralleled by  collaborative research funded by the AHRC on the home as a site of historical knowledge, imagination, meaning and practice and on the social and cultural geography of the Irish border, also funded by the AHRC (published as Partititioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands (Ashgate, 2013).

Interspecies kinship and animal breeding: I have extended my work on kinship and genealogical practices and imaginations by addressing animal breeding and interspecies kinship though a focus on horses and people in Iceland (funded by the British Academy). I continue to pursue this interest in how breed matters to human companion-animal relations and to animal lives through recent research on the figuring of care, kinship and ancestral knowledge in the development and marketing genetic breed ascertainment tests for mixed breed dogs. 

 

some recent and key publications

  • Nash, C. (2024) 'Valuing difference: How breed matters for animal lives and relations' Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 7(2), 702-719.
  • Hamper, J. and Nash, C. (2021) 'Bonding work: Spacing relations through pregnancy apps' Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12446

  • Nash, C. (2020) 'Kinship of Different Kinds: Horses and People in Iceland' Humanimalia, 12(1) 118-144.

  • Nash, C. (2020) 'Breed wealth: origins, encounter value and the international love of a breed', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45(4): 849-861.

  • Nash, C. (2018) 'Making kinship with human remains: repatriation, biomedicine and the many relations of Charles Byrne' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(5) 867–884
  • Nash, C. (2017) 'The politics of genealogical incorporation: ethnic difference, genetic relatedness and national belonging' Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(14): 2539-2557

  • Nash, C. and Lipman, C. (2019) 'Domestic genealogies: how people relate to those who once lived in their homes' cultural geographies 26(3):273-288
  • Nash, C. (2015) Genetic Geographies: The Trouble with Ancestry, Minnesota University Press.
  • Nash, C. (2008) Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Back to top