Karen Till

I am a cultural geographer, feminist scholar, curator, creative writer, and activist who engages in collaborative research about place, memory and creative practice. Working with artists, community leaders, and activists, my research facilitates pedagogical and creative spaces that invite diverse publics to advance practices of memory-work and an ethics of care to repair places in cities wounded by state-perpetrated violence. At Maynooth Geography, I direct the Space&Place Research Collaborative (Ireland). I am a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, co-convene the Feminist Counter-Topographies Reading Group, and am founding co-convener of the Mapping Spectral Traces network of artists, practitioners and scholars. 

My book in progress, Wounded City, highlights the significance of place-based memory-work and ethical forms of care at multiple scales that may contribute to creating more socially just futures. Through geo-ethnographic research and stories from Berlin, Bogotá, Cape Town, Dublin, Minneapolis, and Roanoke, I examine the significance of place in personal and social memory-work and an ethics of care, to address the ongoing legacies of forms of state-perpetrated and systemic violence. My curatorial work invites artists, practitioners, community leaders, scholars and publics to explore how creative practices might enable more responsible and sustainable approaches to caring for places, shared environments and cities.

I received a Ph.D. in Cultural Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1996), a research M.A. in Cultural and Urban Geography (1991) and B.A. in Ecosystems (1986) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously I held tenured posts in Geography at Louisiana State University, University of Minnesota, and Royal Holloway, University College London, and in Urban Planning, and Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech University.