My expertise lies in interpreting historic landscapes, maps, and built environments, in particular using geospatial technologies (eg. GNSS/GIS/GPS). In 2018 I received from the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) the Cuthbert Peek Award 

"For advancing geographical knowledge through the application of contemporary methods, including GIS and mapping."

For more than a decade I have led cross-disciplinary research projects mapping and evaluating historic fabric and form of towns and cities in Britain and Ireland, collaborating with research organisations, non-academic partners and local communities through public engagement activities and the development of web-based resources (eg see http://www.qub.ac.uk/urban_mapping/; http://www.medievalchester.ac.uk/; http://www.medievalswansea.ac.uk/en/; http://discover.medievalchester.ac.uk/). I also have made a significant contribution to the history of cartography and digital mapping, creating online map-based web-resources to help broaden access to and use of historic maps (eg. seehttp://www.goughmap.org/; http://ria.ie/digitalatlasderry).

I am currently chair of the Historic Towns Trust (HTT), a charitable organisation that oversees the production of the British Historic Towns Atlas series (see http://historictownsatlas.org.uk/) as part of the wider international European historic towns atlases project (seehttp://www.historictownsatlas.org.uk/hta-programme) established in 1955.

My books include:

• Urban Life in the Middle Ages: 1000-1450 (Palgrave, 2002) 
• City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form (Reaktion, 2009)
• Mapping Medieval Geographies (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

I am currently completing a new book, called Sovereign Spaces: Survey, Statecraft and Ruling the Realm under the Plantagenet Kings, which uses ‘rule’ as both power and measure to explore how medieval monarchs exercised sovereignty and governed their realms.

My current funded research projects include:

• ‘Living Legacies 1914-18: From Past Conflict to Shared Future’ – an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded public engagement centre based at Queen’s University Belfast to foster collaborations between academic and community researchers on heritage of World War 1 – for more information see http://www.livinglegacies1914-18.ac.uk/ 
• ‘Mapping Lineages: Quantifying the Evolution of Maps of the British Isles’ – a Leverhulme Trust funded project in collaboration with University of Liverpool and National University of Ireland Maynooth, in partnership with the British Library, to result in a new interactive mapping platform allowing users to navigate the changing nature of cartography of Britain and Ireland.

• ‘Inventor of Britain: The Complete Works of Humphrey Llwyd’ – an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project in collaboration with University of Exeter and National Library of Wales, to explore Humphrey Llwyd’s work as a Renaissance geographer and cartographer at a particularly exciting point in the long history of European cartography.

• ‘Surveying Empires – Archaeologies of Colonial Cartography’ – a project funded by the British Academy exploring the material cultures of surveying and map-making in India through the field-practices the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, evaluating and interpreting the sites, locales and landscape legacies of ‘colonial cartography’ in a post-colonial world.

Awards and Distinctions

• Institute Fellow, The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, QUB, 2016-
• Institute Fellow, Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities (ICRH), QUB, 2013
• Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, 2008
• Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2006-7
• British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, 1996-1999 

Elected and appointed positions on external research bodies:

• Chair, Historic Towns Trust/British Historic Towns Atlas, 2014-
• Board Member, International Commission of the History of Towns (ICHT), 2011-
• Chair, ‘Spatial Technologies and the Medieval City’ (STeMCity) research network, 2011-13
• UK Co-representative, General Assembly of the International Commission of the History of Towns (ICHT), 2010-
• Board member, British Historic Towns Atlas Committee, 2006-
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHS), elected 2005.
• Council Officer (Treasurer), 2005-2008, International Seminar on Urban Form (ISUF)
• Conference officer, 1997-2000, Historical Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society.
• Committee member, 1998-2000, 2003-2006, Medieval Settlement Research Group. 

Current Teaching:

GGY2053 Maps and Mappings: from the Stone Age to the Digital Age (Module Coordinator)

GGY2002 GIS and Landscapes

Current Administrative Roles

School of NBE, Director of Research ('Culture & Society')