Professor Tim Schwanen

Tim is Director of the Transport Studies Unit, Professor of Transport Geography in the School of Geography and the Environment, and also a Supernumerary Fellow at St Anne's College. He joined the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) in March 2009 and became Director in September 2015.

Tim is one of the editors of Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice, the youngest addition to the E&P family, and he serves on the editorial advisory boards of five journals focused on transport and mobility. Since September 2021 he has been a Fellow of the Academy for Social Sciences, the UK's national academy for academics, learned societies and practitioners in the social sciences.

Tim obtained his PhD from the Department of Human Geography and Planning of Utrecht University, The Netherlands in 2003 (cum laude), after which he worked as a post-doctoral researcher and Lecturer in Urban Geography at the same university. Tim joined the University of Oxford in March 2009, first as a Research Fellow at the TSU and later as Departmental Lecturer in Transport Studies and Human Geography. He has fulfilled the TSU Director role since September 2015 and was the Fellow in Geography at St Anne's College in 2015-2021. He also was a Visiting Professor in Human Geography at the School of Business, Economics and Law of the University of Gothenburg in 2016-2019.

Tim is a member of the SoGE Technological Natures: Materialities, mobilities, politics research cluster.

Tim's research concentrates on the geographies of the everyday mobilities of people, goods and information. It is international in outlook, interdisciplinary in scope, informed by the thinking in various sub-disciplines within Geography, and organised around five more general concerns:

• Low-carbon mobilities and cities - innovation and experimentation, politics and governance, justice;
• Futures and temporality - sociotechnical transitions, path dependency, habit, rhythm, resilience, vulnerability;
• Social and spatial inequality - age, gender, the role of mobility and infrastructure;
• Well-being - conceptualisations, relationships with mobility and place, politics;
• Philosophy of transport and mobility - history of thought and praxis, new concepts and modes of thinking.

Tim teaches on the Preliminary Examination (Prelims) and Final Honour School (FHS) in Geography, as well as the Nature, Society and Environmental Governance (NSEG) MSc programme.

On the Prelims programme he teaches some of the 'Networks and Mobilities' lectures in the Human Geography course. He coordinates and teaches on the FHS Special Subject course 'Transport and Mobilities'. On the NSEG Course he teaches half of 'Decision Making Processes', which is one of the programme's core modules, and co-teaches the 'Cities, Mobility and Climate Change' Elective to students across the School's MSc students.

Tim leads the Geography School at St Anne's College and teaches on all the short courses of TSU's 'Global Challenges in Transport' professional education programme.

Tim regularly gives key notes and invited talks at conferences and departments, including the 15th NECTAR Conference "Towards Human Scale Cities - Open and Happy" in Helsinki in June 2019.

He was the editor-in-chief of Journal of Transport Geography in 2013-2015 and currently serves on the editorial advisory boards of multiple academic journals: Applied Mobilities, European Journal of Future Studies, Journal of Transport Geography, Sustainability, Transportation, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, and Travel Behaviour and Society.

Tim is one of the Fellows of the KiM Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis.