Hawkins' research is focused on the advancement of the geo-humanities, a field that sits at the intersection of geographical scholarship with arts and humanities scholarship and practice. Empirically, she explores the geographies of art works and art worlds. She was educated at the University of Nottingham, where she completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in geography with first-class honours, a Master of Arts degree in landscape and culture, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree examining the geographies of art and rubbish, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and supervised by Stephen Daniels. After leaving Nottingham, she held AHRC Research Fellowships at the University of Exeter and Aberystwyth University, and was a lecturer at the University of Bristol, before arriving at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2012. She was promoted to professor in 2016. At Royal Holloway, she is also Co-Director of the Centre for the Geo-Humanities with Veronica Della Dora. The centre connects arts and humanities scholars and practitioners, geographers and the creative and cultural sectors. It encourages work with an arts and humanities perspective on issues that have a strong geographical resonance, such as space, place, landscape, and environment. Its over 50 members include: Felix Driver, Robert Hampson, Julian Johnson, and Jo Shapcott. She serves as the Deputy Director of the Technē AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership which awards 60 doctoral studentships per year, across nine academic institutions in London and the South East of England, in partnership with organisations such as Historic Royal Palaces, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the National Theatre and the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is also managing editor of the journal Cultural Geographies, and associate editor of GeoHumanities. She is the Chair of the Royal Geographical Society Social and Cultural Geography Research Group, and is a Panel Chair for the United Kingdom Research and Innovation Future Leader Fellowships Peer Review College. She has delivered over 60 invited lectures, keynotes and plenaries in 16 countries, and examined 28 doctoral theses in nine countries. In April 2019, Hawkins delivered the Cultural Geographies Annual Lecture, titled Going Underground: Creating Subterranean Imaginations, at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. In July 2020, she will be a plenary speaker at The Institute of Australian Geographers annual conference. In December 2019, it was announced that Hawkins was one of 301 researchers, across all disciplines and from 24 countries, selected from 2,453 applicants for the award of a prestigious five-year European Research Council Consolidator Grant, as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, for her project Thinking Deep – Novel creative approaches to the underground, providing funding of up to €2 million.
Honours and awards
European Research Council Consolidator Grant, Thinking Deep – Novel creative approaches to the underground
Cultural Geographies Annual Lecture, Going Underground: Creating Subterranean Imaginations
Chair of the Royal Geographical Society Social and Cultural Geography Research Group
