Background

I am a human geographer with an interest in the application of quantitative methods to issues of social and historical change. I have taught and conducted research at universities across the north of England and prior to that I taught at secondary schools in both the UK and Japan. I am a UK-state qualified secondary school teacher and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Previous University Positions

2015-2019: Lecturer in Human Geography, Geography Department, Durham University, UK

2011-2015: Research Fellow in Quantitative Analysis of Socio-Cultural Change, CRESC: Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, University of Manchester, UK

2008-2010: Research Associate in History, History Department, Lancaster University, UK

Qualifications

2008-2014: PhD in Historical Geography, Lancaster University, UK (Part-Time)

2006-2007: MSc in Geographical Information Systems, University of Leeds, UK

2000-2001: PGCE in Secondary Education (History), Institute of Education, University of London, UK 

1997-1998: MA in History, University College Dublin, Ireland

1994-1997: BA(Hons) in Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, UK

Research

Boundaries, Belonging and Conflict

My research interests and outputs can be broadly classified into two main areas of activity. The first is within the sub-discipline of political geography and coheres around issues of identity, place and boundary-making. Most of my work in this area has focussed on the Irish context. I started off in academia working on the construction of an Historical Geographical Information System or HGIS using census and other statistical data to understand long-term changes in the socio-economic and ethnic composition of the island of Ireland over the period since the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. My PhD was on spatial patterns of ethnic violence in the city of Belfast during the twentieth century, covering the two greatest periods of unrest in the city's history, those surrounding partition and the creation of Northern Ireland between 1920 and 1922, and the more protracted and better-known 'Troubles' from 1969 to 2001. More recently, I have become interested in microscale approaches to social and historical change and have recently completed work on a British Academy grant to virtually repopulate some of Belfast's most contested 'interface' areas using individual census returns, alongside large-scale mapping, gazetteers and other contemporaneous archive material. I maintain an active interest in using 'traditional' historical methodologies and sources alongside innovative digital approaches. In this strand of work I am also seeking to broaden out considerations of social and political borders to think through the selective permeability of national and neighbourhood boundaries based upon the injustices associated with class and race.  

Class, Race, and Structures of Urban Inequality and Materiality

The other major thrust in my work lies around an engagement with issues of social class - its measurement and its implications, particularly in urban contexts. This interest stemmed from my time at CRESC: The ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), where one of the projects I was involved in was the BBC's 'Great British Class Survey' (GBCS). The GBCS sought to develop conceptions of social class beyond traditional 'employment aggregate' approaches to consider the wider social and cultural drivers and implications of class position through the adoption of a Bourdieusian conceptual lens. The initial findings were published as 'A New Model of Social Class' in 2013, and further developed in the popular monograph, Social Class in the 21st Century (Penguin: 2015). This has also led to a wider series of interventions on class structure in urban space, and I am currently thinking some of these issues through in a comparative context, through an ESRC-funded grant, designed to build a network of scholarship between the UK and Japan with a series of events to be hosted in both countries in 2020. I am also deeply interested in the wider 'costs of class' and the implications of class location and social mobility for mental and physical health and wellbeing. 

External Grant Funding

2019: ESRC Social Science Humanities Japan-UK Connections Call: (P.I.) 'Culture, Class, Connection: Bridging Debates on Social Class and Inequality in the UK and Japan' (£60,547)

2018: Recession and Mental Health in Scotland: Do Personal or Community Factors Promote Resilience to Labour Market (£9247.00 from ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics (INNOGEN))

2017: ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative: (Co-I) 'Recession and Mental Health in Scotland: Do Personal or Community Factors Promote Resilience to Labour Market Change?' (£163,000)

2016: British Academy: (PI) 'The Greatest Turn of the Ratchet: Belfast 1920-22' SG161841 (£5,857)

2016: European Commission Horizon 2020: (Co-I.) ‘NATure-based URban innoVATION’. H2020-EU.3.5.4.2 ID: 730243 (€7.8 million)

2013: ESRC Festival of Social Science 2013: (P.I.) ‘Class Matters: Understanding Inequality in Contemporary Britain’, Public Event, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, 8 November 2013 (£1,750)

2010: British Academy: (named researcher) 'Mapping the Congregations of God: The Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 1851-2001' SG090803 (£7,031)

Teaching

In academic year 2019-20, I teach on the following modules:                                                                                                              

• GEO1015: Human Geographies of the UK
• GEO2110: Social Geographies (Module Leader)
• GEO2043: Key Methods for Human Geographers
• GEO2111: Doing Human Geography Research: Theory and Practice
• GEO2128: Comparative Urbanism and Central Europe: Vienna and Bratislava Fieldcourse
• GEO8015: Doing Geographical Research

My office hours in 2019-20 are:

• Mondays: 11-12
• Tuesdays: 9-11

I currently co-supervise four PhD students with colleagues at Durham and Northumbria Universities and have supervised the following students to successful completion to date: 

1. Victoria Smith (May 2019) ‘Using Agent-Based Modelling and Social Network Analysis to understand power and interaction in CAtchment Based Approaches (CABA) to water network management’ 
   
2. Mildred Ajebon (June 2019) ‘Geographical Perspectives on the Social Determinants of Inequalities in Under-Five Mortality in Nigeria: Towards an Integrated Approach. 

I would be pleased to receive enquiries on potential PhD supervision relating to my areas of research activity.

Publications

• Curtis S, Pearce J, Cherrie M, Dibben C, Cunningham N, Bambra C. Changing labour market conditions during the ‘great recession’ and mental health in Scotland 2007–2011: an example using the Scottish Longitudinal Study and data for local areas in Scotland. Social Science and Medicine 2019, 227, 1-9.
• Cunningham N. Data. In: Newcastle Social Geographies Collective, ed. Social Geographies: An Introduction. London: Rowman & Littlefied, 2019. In Press.
• Cunningham N. Data and Statistics. In: Darling,J;Wilson,H, ed. Research Ethics in Human Geography. London: SAGE, 2019. In Press.
• Recchi E, Favell A, Apaydin F, Barbulescu R, Braun M, Ciornei I, Cunningham N, Diez Medrano J, Duru D, Hanquinet L, Potzschke S, Reimer D, Salamonska J, Savage M, Solgaard Jensen J, Varela A. Everyday Europe: Social Transnationalism in an Unsettled Continent. Bristol: Policy Press, 2019.
• Cunningham N. Making and mapping Britain's 'new ordinary elite'. Urban Geography 2019, 40(5), 604-626.
• Cunningham N. Territorial Markers and the Politics of Place. In: Storey,D, ed. Research Agenda for Territory and Territoriality. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019. Submitted.
• Savage M, Hanquinet L, Cunningham N, Hjellbrekke J. Emerging Cultural Capital in the City: Profiling London and Brussels. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2018, 42(1), 138-149.
• Cunningham N, Miles A, Leguina A. The Ghosts of Class: Space, Waste and Hope in the Ex-Industrial North. In: Dodsworth F; Walford A, ed. A World Laid Waste? Responding to the Social, Cultural and Political Consequences of Globalisation. London: Routledge, 2018.
• Cunningham N, Snee H, Devine F. A Classless Society? Making Sense of Inequalities in the UK with the Great British Class Survey. In: Fee, D; Kober-Smith, A, ed. Inequalities in the UK: Perceptions, Actions, Evolutions. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2017.
• Savage M, Hecht K, Hjellbrekke J, Cunningham N, Laurison D. An Anatomy of the British Economic "Elite". In: Korsnes O; Heilbron J; Hjellbrekke J; Buhlmann F; Savage M, ed. New Directions in Elite Studies. London: Routledge, 2017.
• Cunningham N, Savage M. An elite and intensifying city: New geographies of social class and inequality in contemporary London. CITY 2017, 21(1), 25-46.
• Cunningham N, Gregory I. Appendix: Mapping Ireland’s Changing Demography, 1834-2002. In: Biagini, EF; Daly, ME, ed. The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp.604-620.
• Brown L, Cunningham N. The Inner Geographies of a Migrant Gateway: Mapping the Built Environment and the Dynamics of Caribbean Mobility in Manchester, 1951-2011. Social Science History 2016, 40(1), 93-120.
• Gregory I, Cunningham N. 'The judgement of God on an indolent and unself-reliant people'?: the impact of the Great Irish Famine on Ireland's religious demography. Journal of Historical Geography 2016, 51, 76-87.
• Savage M, Cunningham N. Why Inequality Matters: The Lessons of Brexit. Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 2016. Available at: http://items.ssrc.org/why-inequality-matters-the-lessons-of-brexit/.
• Cunningham N. 'A sort of whirlwind': Mapping the Changing Geography of Presbyterian Religious Observance in Ireland. International Review of Sociology 2015, 25(2), 218-234.
• Savage M, Devine F, Cunningham N, Friedman D, Laurison D, Miles A, Snee H, Taylor M. On Social Class, Anno 2014. Sociology 2015, 49(6), 1011-1030.
• Savage M, Cunningham N, Devine F, Friedman S, Laurison D, McKenzie L, Miles A, Snee H, Wakeling P. Social Class in the 21st Century. London: Penguin, 2015.
• Cunningham N, Savage M. The secret garden? Elite metropolitan geographies in the contemporary UK. Sociological Review 2015, 63(2), 321-348.
• Cunningham N, Gregory I. Hard to miss, easy to blame? Peacelines, interfaces and political deaths during the Belfast Troubles, 1969-2001. Political Geography 2014, 40, 64-78.
• Ell P, Cunningham N, Gregory I. No spatial watershed: religious geographies of Ireland pre-and post-Famine. In: Corporaal, M; Cusack, C; Janssen, L; van den Beuken, R, ed. Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014, pp.197-224.
• Cunningham N. 'Troubled Geographies': An Historical GIS of Religion, Society and Conflict in Ireland Since the Great Famine. In: Gregory, I; Geddes, A, ed. Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014.
• Cunningham N. "The Integrity of Their Quarrel": A Spatial Analysis of Conflict Deaths during the Troubles in Belfast, 1969-2001. CRESC Working Paper Series 2013, (133), 1-24.
• CRESC Encounters Collaborative The. ‘(Un)doing Collaboration: Reflections on the Practices of Collaborative Research. CRESC Working Paper 127 2013.
• Cunningham N. “A sort of whirlwind”: Political Violence and Changing Patterns of Presbyterian Religious Observance in Ireland. In: Proceedings of the EUREL-CRESC Colloquium 2012: Religion and Territory. 2013, University of Manchester, UK: EUREL.
• Savage M, Devine F, Li Y, Cunningham N, Taylor M, Hjellbrekke J, Le Roux B, Friedman S, Miles A. A new model of social class: findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey experiment. Sociology 2013, 47(2), 219-250.
• Cunningham N, Gregory I. Religious change in 20th century Ireland: A spatial history. Irish Geography 2013.
• Cunningham N. 'The doctrine of vicarious punishment’: space, religion and the Belfast Troubles of 1920-22. Journal of Historical Geography 2013, 40(1), 52-66.
• Cunningham N. The Social Geography of Violence During the Belfast Troubles, 1920-22. CRESC Working Paper 122 2013.
• Gregory I, Cunningham N, Lloyd C, Shuttleworth I, Ell P. Troubled Geographies: A Spatial History of Religion and Society in Ireland. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013.