Professor Marcus Doel is Research Professor of Human Geography, and is the Head of the School of the Environment and Society at Swansea University.

Professor Doel studied geography, economics, and accountancy as an undergraduate at the University of Bristol between 1984 and 1987, where he secured a first-class B.Sc. (Hons) degree in Geography, specializing in Marxian political economy and structuralist urban geography. Between 1987 and 1991, he pursued his PhD in continental philosophy and human geography at the University of Bristol under the direction of Professor Nigel Thrift and Dr Keith Bassett, laying the foundation for a post-structuralist conception of human geography and spatial science.

Professor Doel took up his first lectureship in Human Geography at Liverpool John Moores University in 1991. Here he established his reputation for forging a new kind of geography by excavating and radicalizing the largely indiscernible spatial theory at work in the texts of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, before moving to Loughborough University in 1996.

He was promoted to Senior Lecturer at Loughborough in 1999, the year in which his seminal work, Poststructuralist Geography: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science, was published.

In 2000, he was appointed as Research Professor of Human Geography at Swansea University, becoming Director of Research for the Department of Geography in 2002, the Director of Research for the School of the Environment and Society in 2005, and the Co-director of Swansea University’s Centre for Urban Theory in 2006. In 2007, Professor Doel was appointed Head of the School of the Environment and Society, which is currently home to over 150 staff and 800 undergraduate and postgraduate students spanning biological sciences, development studies, human and physical geography, and sociology and anthropology. He currently serves on the editorial boards of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers and a member of the Association of American Geographers.

In addition to poststructuralist spatial theory, his research interests include photography and film, postmodern fiction and conceptual art, and consumer culture and risk society. He is currently investigating the spatial theory of Alain Badiou, modernity’s optical unconscious, and the work of space in community pharmacy and general practice. He also has a passion for strange coincidence and trance music, and enjoys seasonal kitsch.