Professor Catherine Nash

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.

Teaching

My aim in teaching is to create a stimulating and supportive context for learning. This means fostering active student engagement with concepts, approaches and issues in a wide range of teaching contexts and advising students in module teaching and as a tutor and supervisor of undergraduate, Masters and PhD students.

Engaging with ideas and issues in concrete ways through well-prepared and in-depth fieldwork has been an especially important dimension of my teaching and was the basis for the lecture, seminar and field work module ‘Geography, Identity, Belonging’ which focused on these themes in Ireland and Northern Ireland. I reflect on this module in my contribution to a set of papers on teaching political geography in the journal Political Geography:

• Alison J. Williams, Alex Jeffrey, Fiona McConnell, Nick Megoran, Kye Askins,  Nick Gill, Catherine Nash and Raksha Pande (2013) ‘Interventions in teaching political geography: Reflections on practice’, Political Geography, 34: 2434.

Student evaluations of this fieldwork based module have been especially enthusiastic:

• ‘The field trip was an excellent method through which to really engage with the themes of the course’
•  ‘Good work team, a very enjoyable and most importantly, stimulating week’
• ‘Very enjoyable and thought provoking’
•  ‘Brilliant’
• ‘Very enjoyable course’
• ‘Fieldtrip really interesting and informative’
•  ‘Awesome course, would recommend to anyone’
•  ‘Fantastic! Love, love, love it!’

I have recently worked with colleagues to engage with decolonising initiatives especially, but not only, through my first year teaching, and launched a new third year option module called 'Kinship: Geographical Perspectives'. It has been very rewarding to work through new ideas and issues with students on the module and see how much they have engaged with and achieved through this teaching. 

Undergraduate

I convene and teach the following modules

• GEG4014 Critical Geography: Environment and Society
• GEG6146 Kinship: Geographical Perspectives

Through tutorial teaching and dissertation supervision I contribute to:

• GEG4009 Academic Study Skills
• GEG5103 Geographical Research in Practice
• GEG6099 Dissertation

Masters

I contribute to the module GEG7120 Geographical Thought and Practice and convene the Masters Dissertation Modules: GEG7138 and GEG7139. 

Research

Research Interests:

My most recent research funded through the British Academy explored interspecies kinship in Iceland through a focus on human-horse relations. This is part of my current research on more-than-human kinship and animal breeds and breeding.

In my current project entitled Pedigree and place: breed origins and relations I am developing a geographical perspective on the concept of breeds and breeding practices and exploring the significance of place of breed origin for human-animal relationships, human social relations and animal lives.

Recent publications from this work include:

 

• Nash, C. (2024) ‘Valuing difference: How breed matters for animal lives and relations’ Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 7(2), 702-719.

• 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.

Previous research projects include:

i. Living with the Past at Home: Domestic Prehabitation and Inheritance, 2012–2014 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, AHRC

(Principal Investigator: Catherine Nash, Co-Investigators: Alastair Owens and Alison Blunt, Research Fellow: Caron Lipman).

This project extended recent work on the cultural geographies of everyday domestic spaces and forms of public history by addressing how the past is imaginatively reconstructed and experienced in the home. It took up an archaeological focus on ‘pre-habitation’ – which concerns the investigation of once-inhabited places where traces of habitation remain – to explore the experiences, meanings, knowledges, attitudes, practices and material dimensions associated with senses of domestic pre-habitation and inheritance in Britain. The research featured in our project exhibition, entitled  Who Once Lived in My House?, at the Geffrye Museum of the Home, London (24 September 2013 – 9 February 2014).

 

ii. Irish border/lands: cultural geographies of division, interconnection and diversity, 2004–2007, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council 

(Principal Investigators: Catherine Nash and Brian Graham, Research Fellows: Amanda McMullan and Bryonie Reid).

This project explored the nature and effects of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland from the perspectives of those who have lived on or near this border since it was established at the beginning of the 1920s, focusing in particular on the period from 1950 to the present day. Though archival sources and interviews the project examined the changing nature of the border over time, its effects on everyday life, the distinctive regional impacts of these effects, the symbolic, material and practised dimensions of the border, and the senses of local, regional, national and cross-border collective identities and differences, interconnections and divisions, through the accounts of those most directly affected by the border. The research has been published as journal papers and in:

• C. Nash, B. Reid and B. Graham, (2013) Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands, Ashgate.

Much of the research for the project also features on the project website at: www.irishborderlands.com

iii. Genealogy and genetics: cultural geographies of relatedness, 2004–2007, a Research Fellowship funded by the Social and Economic Research Council.

The programme of research carried out during this Research Fellowship set out to examine the understandings of human relatedness being expressed through and shaped by contemporary popular and scientific explorations of personal and collective origins and ancestry. More specifically, it sought to address the ways in which ideas of human connection and difference and categories of ethnicity, gender, race, and national identity feature within and are reconfigured through the practices, technologies and cultures of popular genealogy, human population genetics and their intersection in genetic genealogy. My research explored the political implications of the geographies of human relatedness being shaped by ideas of shared and distinctive collective ancestry and ancestral origins. The research has been published as journal papers and is the basis of two books:

• C. Nash, (2008) Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
• C. Nash (2015) Genetic Geographies: The Trouble with Ancestry Minnesota University Press.

Publications

A full list of publications is available at this link

Selected 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. 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 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. 2017, 'Genealogical relatedness: Geographies of Shared Descent and Difference', Genealogy, 1(2) doi:10.3390/genealogy1020007
• Nash, C. (2015) Genetic Geographies: The Trouble with Ancestry, Minnesota University Press.
• Nash, C. (2013) 'Genome geographies: mapping national ancestry and diversity in human population genetics', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(2): 193–206.
• Nash, C. (2012) 'Genetics, Race and Relatedness: Human Mobility and Human Diversity in the Genographic Project', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(3): 667–684
• Nash, C. (2012) 'Gendered geographies of human genetic variation: sex, power and mobility in human population genetics', Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 19(4): 409–428.
• Nash, C.  (2012) 'Irish DNA: Making Connections and Making Distinctions in Y-Chromosome Surname Studies' in Katharina Schramm, David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg eds. Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/creating Categories of Difference and Belonging, Berghahn Press, 141–16.
• Nash, C. and B. Reid, 2010, 'Border crossings: new approaches to the Irish border', Irish Studies Review, 18(3): 265–284.
• Nash, C., L. Dennis, and B, Graham, 2010, 'Putting the border in place: customs regulation in the making of the Irish border, 1921–1945', Journal of Historical Geography, 36:421–431.
• Nash, C. (2008), Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and The Politics of Belonging, Syracuse University Press.
• Nash, C. (2007) 'Mapping origins: race and relatedness in population genetics and genetic genealogy' in Paul Atkinson and Peter Glasner eds. New Genetics, New Identities, Routledge, 77–100.
• Nash C. (2006) 'Irish Origins, Celtic Origins: Population Genetics, Cultural Politics', Irish Studies Review, 14 (1): 11–37
• Graham, B. and Nash C. (2006) 'A Shared Future: Territoriality, Pluralism and Public Policy in Northern Ireland’ Political Geography 25(3): 253–278
• Nash, C. (2005) 'Geographies of Relatedness' Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 449–462
• Nash, C. (2005) 'Local Histories in Northern Ireland' History Workshop Journal 60 45–68
• Nash, C. (2005) 'Equity, diversity and interdependence: cultural policy in Northern Ireland' Antipode 37(2): 272–300
• Nash, C. (2005) 'Mapping Emotion: longing and location in the work of Kathy Prendergast' in Fintan Cullen  ed. A Shared Legacy: essays on Irish and Scottish Art and Visual Culture, Ashgate, 272–245
• Nash, C. (2004) 'Genetic kinship' Cultural Studies, 18(1): 1–34
• Jacobs, J. M. and Nash, C. (2003) 'Too Little, Too Much: cultural feminist geographies' Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 10(3): 265–279
• Nash, C. (2003) ''They’re family!': cultural geographies of relatedness in popular genealogy' in Sara Armed, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller eds. Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Berg, Oxford and New York, 179–203
• Nash, C. (2003) 'Setting roots in motion: genealogy, geography and identity' in David Trigger and Gareth Griffiths eds. Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 29–52
• Nash, C. (2002) 'Genealogical identities' Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20(1): 27–52

Supervision

Current PhD students

• Etka Oza Children and Young People as Political Beings: Voice, Everyday Life and Protest in Kashmir, India
  QMUL Studentship funded
• Matthew Beach Connective Tissues: (Un)lively Materialities of Gelatine and Collagen, QMUL Studentship funded
• Vikki Barry Brown, Being English in Ireland, Leverhulme Trust funded.

Past PhD Students

• Eimear Kelly, Alternative forms of Irish Dance’, QMUL Studentship funded.
• Josie Hamper, Women, smartphones and maternal health apps’, ESRC funded.
• Hayley Peacock, Bringing places to life: The politics of urban colour interventions’, ESRC funded.
• Shereen Fernandez, Securitising Britishness - the impacts of the promotion of fundamental British values and the Prevent strategy on schools, teachers and Muslim communities in London, ESRC funded.
• Charlotte Wrigley, Discontinuous earth: permafrost life in the anthropocene' ESRC funded
• Faith Taylor, Love In The Time Of Precarity: Reproduction and Intimacy in Young People's Lives in London’, QMUL funded.
• Sarah Morton, The legacies of the repatriation of human remains’, AHRC funded. 
• Eilidh Reid, ‘Masculine Emotional Geographies: Home, Ageing and Later Life’, Funded by a Queen Mary, University of London, College Studentship.
• Carey Newson, Inside Teenager Bedrooms’, Funded by the ESRC.
• Helen Rawling, Life taking shape: arts practices for engaging with the past in post-genocide Rwanda’, Funded by a Queen Mary, University of London, College Studentship.
• Evelyn Owen, Geographies of African Art’, ESRC funded.
• Shelley Grant, Geographies of transnational adoption: demographics, regulation, economics and representation’. QMUL Studentship funded.
• Joanna Long, Daar al Falastini: home, family and identity among Palestinians in Britain’. ESRC funded.
• Caron Lipman, The Domestic Uncanny: Co-habiting with ghosts’, QMUL Studentship Funded.
• Holly McLaren, Bordering Art: Geography, Collaboration and Creative Practices’, AHRC funded.
• Jill Fenton, Une géographie passionnelle: Contemporary Surrealism in Paris’, ESRC funded.
• Lorraine Denis, Historical Geographies of the Irish Borderlands’, AHRC funded.
• Rebecka Fox, Cultural geographies of pet keeping’ ESRC funded.
• Sarah Cant, Cultural geographies of caving, ESRC funded.
• Tariq Jazeel, Being Sri Lankan: Three Cultural Geographies, ESRC funded.
• Kate Arblaster, Walking through time: a study of Cwmdu 1850–1020, Self funded.

I welcome enquiries from those who would like to undertake PhD research in cultural geography on topics related but not restricted to my particular research interests. How to apply.

Public Engagement

I have a longstanding interest in imaginative ways of engaging with the public and in exploring the intersections between academic and creative modes of producing knowledge and exploring ideas. This stemmed initially from a PhD in geography and art history at the University of Nottingham, which included a focus on visual art in Ireland in the early and late twentieth century, and whose research formed the basis of the exhibition Irish Geographies: Six Contemporary Artists, Djanolgy Art Centre, University of Nottingham, 1997.

That research led to a longstanding interest in the work of artist Kathy Prendergast and a collaborative relationship which later resulted in our successful application for her award of an AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway. The project we developed there to explore the relationship between geography and visual art entitled Visualising Geographies funded by an AHRC Innovation Award was exhibited in 2004 and documented in Landings: Eight Collaborative Projects Between Artists and Geographers.

I have written about her work in geography and art history publications, and more recently, in an exhibition catalogue essay:

• C. Nash, (1998) ‘Mapping Emotion’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16(1): 1–9
• C. Nash, (2005) ‘Mapping Emotion: longing and location in the work of Kathy Prendergast’ in Fintan Cullen ed. A Shared Legacy: essays on Irish and Scottish Art and Visual Culture, Ashgate, 272–245
• C. Nash, (2010) ‘Black Maps’ Catalogue essay to accompany the exhibition Kathy Prendergast: The Black Maps Series, London: Peer

More widely I have tried to foster creative ways of doing cultural geography by establishing the section ‘Cultural Geographies in Practice’ in the journal Cultural Geographies in 2000. See:

• C. Nash, (2013) ‘Cultural Geography in Practice’ in Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, and Jamie Winders eds. Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography, Wiley-Blackwell, 45–56

The work of the Living with the Past at Home project was exhibited at the Geffrye Museum of the Home, London as the Who Once Lived in My House? exhibition (24 September 2013 – 9 February 2014).