School of Geography graduate awarded prize for 2025 dissertation

The school are pleased to announce that Adam Newton has been awarded the runner-up prize for the 2025 Animal Geographies Working Group undergraduate dissertation competition for his dissertation Out of Place in the Home of Leviathan: Historical cultural geographies of British whaling 1733-1887.

The assessing committee state that this was ‘a brilliant dissertation which explores the hybrid geographies of British whaling practices in the 19th century in the fluid and active production of meanings, identities, and social relations of oceanic spaces. The author should be commended for their ambitious approach, which draws from a diverse body of literature, predominantly poststructuralist theory. The dissertation advances the concerns of the AGWG through its focus on the geographies with/of/for animals and its conceptualisation of oceanic spaces (and whales) in a way that challenges the fixed binaries of nature and culture. Using whaling in 18th and 19th century Britain as an example, it explains that whaling ships and the maritime industry facilitated enlightenment ideas and sites of contestations over Western modernity, progress, and biopower over animal bodies. The methods employed include a significant body of primary archival work, which the author should be commended for. Their use and presentation of archival materials and quotes with embedded analysis is exemplary.’

Adam’s dissertation was supervised by Dr Peter Martin. Congratulations all round!