Staff Profiles

About me

I'm interested in how landscapes are sometimes expected to support complex hopes and/or meet challenging needs, and this interest allows me to research in multiple directions (see below for specifics). One interesting direction for my research is how people have self-prescribed landscapes as a means to cope with the harm they have suffered (such as histories of failure, guilt, pain, loss and precarity). Another interesting direction is what it is like to dwell in, cope with, or otherwise experience landscapes that fell short of the hopes people had of them (such as damaged or "scarred" places). Heritage connects these different and expanding directions of research through my interest in persistence: how do these notions of landscape persist from their temporally distant origins to be known in the present? I was the principal investigator for War and the Moral Outdoors (AHRC Living Legacies) until 2019 and I also managed the travelling exhibition for its earlier sister project, Women and Leisure during the First World War. Since 2024 I've had the huge privilege to serve as the conference officer for the Historical Geography Research Group and I lead its Porous Archives events/publication series, and I'm currently a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Geography. I'm collecting this small (but growing) body of work together under the heading of Perpetrating Landscapes - please do contact me with questions about any of these lines of work, many of which are participatory and where you'd be very welcome to join in.

I practice my research interests across a variety of thematic areas.

• How people use landscapes to address, cope with and endure difficult, even harrowing situations (see War and the Moral Outdoors).
• How the removal of legacy features from landscapes is believed to improve, even "rescue" them (see Perpetrating Landscapes).
• Museum practices and the exhibit/visitor interface (see Bold Visitors under the research tab) (also Wright, 2018).
• Mobilities and the restoration of mobile and quasi-mobile objects (see Wright, 2018).
• Early and mid-Twentieth Century architecture and the architect/client relationship.
• The present day acts and affects of inhabiting "heritage" architecture and dwelling in its intentionality.
• Archives, and via Porous Archives, an ongoing events series exploring how critical historical geographies can shift from treating archives as places/collections of immutable, finished, time-stilled things, to a notion of archives that are porous, affecting and affected by contemporary worlds, and treated as unfinished again.

From my previous experience as a Teaching Fellow I also retain pedagogic interests.

• The experiences of Postgraduate Teaching Assistants (see Wright and Barr, 2019).
• The portability of the Higher Education learning experiences to other Key Stages (see Fizzywig the Pig under the research tab).

Background and qualifications

I was awarded my doctorate from the University of Wales Aberystwyth in 2010. Until 2015 I worked in Higher Education teaching before moving to research focused roles, first at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics and then at the McCord Centre for Landscape, both at Newcastle University. I am currently a Civil Servant, undertaking research and policy advice at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Social media

@paulwright-geog

As Principal Investigator and Lead Applicant:

As Research Associate:

As a heritage consultant:

I was a Human Geography Teaching Fellow at Newcastle University (2013-2015) building on my teaching experience at the University of Leeds (2011-2013).

Modules led:

• Geog2035 Geographies of Economies (Leeds)
• Geo1018 Geographical Analysis (Newcastle)

• Geog1025 Leeds from the local to the global (Leeds)
• Geog1310 People Place and Politics (Leeds)
• Geog2020 Political and Development Geographies (Leeds)
• Geog2040 Inside European Cities, Belgrade fieldtrip (Leeds)
• Geog2065 Research Methods with Career Skills (Leeds)
  
• Geog3600 Dissertation (Leeds)
• Geo1015 Human Geographies of the UK (Newcastle)
  
• Geo1096 Geographical Skills, including Langdale fieldtrip (Newcastle)
  
• Geo2043 Key Methods for Human Geographers (Newcastle)
• Geo2111 Doing Human Geography Research, Theory and Practice (Newcastle)
  
• Geo2123 Social experiments, diverse economies, Copenhagen Fieldtrip (Newcastle)
• Geo3099 Dissertation (Newcastle)

• Fizzywig the Pig (Environmental politics themed children's theatre production in association with Cap-a-Pie)
• Women and Leisure during the First World War (Archive research workshops for community researchers)
• War and the Moral Outdoors (Digital mapping and wayfinding workshops for community reseasrchers)
  

• Articles

  • Barr M, Wright P. Training graduate teaching assistants: What can the discipline offer?. European Political Science 2019, 18(1), 143-156.
  • Wright P. Mobility, museums and awkward unsettling. Area 2018, 51(1), 45-54.
  • Wright P. Provoked hope, future benevolence, and architectural geographies of persistence. Social and Cultural Geography 0. In Preparation.

• Exhibition

  • Wright P. Women and Leisure during the First World War. 2017. St Mary's Heritage Centre, Gateshead; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Central Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, and other venues in Tyne and Wear, Exhibition of nine illustrated panels.

• Report

  • Fyfe F, Wright P. SeaScapes Landscape Partnership Historical and Archaeological Review. 2019.