Dr Margo Huxley: General information
Senior Lecturer in Town and Regional Planning
B.A. (ANU); M.U.P. (Melbourne University); PhD (The Open University).
I have a B.A. in English and History from the Australian National University and a Masters in Urban Planning from the University of Melbourne. I´ve worked in Australia in planning at the local and metropolitan government levels and in private practice; and as an academic teacher and researcher in the fields of urban studies, urban planning and public policy. More recently, and somewhat late in the piece, I have gained a PhD in Geography at the Open University: my thesis was a critical history of aspects of land use regulation in England and Australia. I joined the staff of the Department of Town and Regional Planning as Senior Lecturer in 2005.
In between these pursuits, I´ve been a music journalist, the mother of two sons and am now a grandmother
Research Interests
My research interests have included studies of foreign investment in the built environment and `mega-projects´ in Australia during the 1980s and 1990s; theoretical debates around gender issues, and the gendered nature of Australian suburbia and new suburban developments; and protests by middle-class residential action groups over new multi-unit developments in Melbourne.
My doctoral research was inspired by the works of Michel Foucault, and developed ideas of `governmentality´ in relation to space and the causal qualities of environments presumed in programmes of urban reform, land use regulation and metropolitan planning in England and Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries. I am currently working on a small research project - `The Colony as Settlement´ - in the field of post-colonial cultural geography, comparing the rationales behind `white settler´ colonisations and `home colonies´ in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
My interests may be summarised more generally as being in the fields of: social and cultural geography; post-colonial studies; governmentality; critical histories of urban development, reform and planning; urban form, gender and power in the built environment.
I am interested in supervising doctoral research in the following areas:
- colonial settlement and urban reform;
- critical historical analyses of planning regulations;
- comparative politics and policy in contemporary urban development, especially regeneration, redevelopment and ‘compact city’ policies;
- gender issues in the built environment.
Administrative Duties
I am Deputy Director of the postgraduate Research School, Departmental Research Coordinator (with Dr. Jamie Gough), and a member of the Department´s Research Committee. I organise the Departmental Seminar Series, and Chair the postgraduate Research School Research in Progress Seminars.
I am also the Department´s Research Degrees Admissions Tutor: if you have any queries about doctoral study in the Department, don´t hesitate to contact me.
email : m.huxley@sheffield.ac.uk