Professor of Geography Elaine Stratford will spend four weeks in Italy on a prestigious writing residency awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Writing Center.
The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Writing Centre residency is awarded to approximately 160 people from a pool of more than 1600 applicants from across the globe each year.
The residency offers an opportunity to advance a specific breakthrough project, and a stimulating environment to forge cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural connections with other residents.
Professor Stratford, from the School of Geography, Planning and Spatial Sciences, will spend the residency working on a book that will enlarge and enrich geographical insights on life course studies, showing how geographical concepts such as scale, spatiality, place, and environment are always embedded in the life course and need to be understood as profoundly significant in our lives.
“I aim to show the contributions geographers can make to life course studies and couch it in terms of recentring geographical thought in the field,” she said.
Professor Stratford’s research is motivated by trying to understand the conditions in which people flourish in place, in their movements, in daily life, and over the life-course.
While the book will be pitched towards a well-informed non-academic readership, particularly those working in government policy and related areas, it will also be of interest to academic peers.
Professor Stratford said she felt incredibly proud to be undertaking the residency.
The Bellagio Center Residency Program has brought together leading academics, artists, and practitioners for more than 60 years.
Alumni include luminaries such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Maya Angelou, and Dikgang Moseneke, and trailblazers such as Nikole Hannah-Jones, Akin Omotoso, and Ilwad Elman. The 4000 alumni include 100 Nobel laureates.
The residency offers up to four weeks at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Lake Como, Italy in a shared community of up to 15 scholars, artists, and practitioners and then future participation in an international network of Bellagio Center alumni, united in the shared purpose of creating a better world.
Professor Stratford will take up the residency on January 29, 2025.
