David Harvey

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David Harvey : biography

31 October 1935 –

After the birth of his daughter Delfina in January 1990, Harvey returned to Johns Hopkins from Oxford in 1993, but spent increasing time elsewhere as a speaker and visitor, notably as a salaried Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics in the late 1990s. He moved to the City University of New York in 2001 as a Distinguished Professor, now residing in its Department of Anthropology. He has spent most of his academic career in Anglo-America, with brief sojourns in France and a range of foreign visiting appointments (currently as acting Advisory Professor at Tongji University in Shanghai). He has supervised many PhD students. Several of these, such as Neil Smith, Richard Walker, Erik Swyngedouw, Michael Johns, Maarten Hajer, Patrick Bond, Melissa Wright, and Greg Ruiters now hold important academic positions themselves. Two constants in Harvey’s life and work have been teaching a course on Marx’s Capital,Harvey, D. 2008 An open course consisting of a close reading of the text of Marx’s Capital Volume I in 13 video lectures by David Harvey. and his support for student activism and community and labour movements (notably in Baltimore).

Critical response to Harvey’s work has been sustained. In the early years, there was little love lost between Harvey and proponents of quantitative and non-politicized geography, notably Brian Berry of the University of Texas at Dallas. Harvey’s continued commitment to Marx has led to reappraisals and in some cases rejection by some other scholars. A recent critical appraisal (Castree & Gregory, 2006) explores these critiques in detail. Despite this his online lectures on Capital have proved very popular, receiving 700,000-page views between June 2008 and March 2010.

Harvey’s books have been widely translated, particularly into Korean, Spanish, Japanese and Italian as well some into Arabic, Turkish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, German, Greek, Chinese, Polish, Swedish and Romanian. He holds honorary doctorates from Roskilde (Denmark), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Uppsala (Sweden), Ohio State University (USA), Lund University (Sweden) and the University of Kent (UK). Among other awards he has received the Anders Retzius Gold Medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Vautrin Lud International Prize in Geography (France). He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1998, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

Affiliated Institutions

  • B.A. (Hons) St Johns College, Cambridge, 1957
  • PhD St Johns College, Cambridge, 1961.
  • Post-doc, University of Uppsala, Sweden 1960–1961
  • Lecturer, Geography, University of Bristol, UK (1961–1969)
  • Associate Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, (1969–1973)
  • Professor, Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, Johns Hopkins University (1973–1987, and 1993–2001)
  • Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford (1987–1993)
  • Distinguished Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, City University of New York (2001–present)