Dr. Laura Smith is Lecturer in Human Geography, and research group lead for the department's Cultural and Historical Geographies Research Group (CHGRG). Laura works across cultural geography and the environmental humanities, with research interests in ecological restoration and rewilding, the history and conservation of US public lands, American literature, zines, and environmental protest and activism.

Laura's first book, Ecological Restoration and the U.S. Nature and Environmental Writing Tradition: A Rewilding of American Letters, published in 2022, presents a critical history of the intersections between American environmental literature and ecological restoration policy and practice. Through a storying—restorying—restoring framework, the book explores how entanglements between writers and places have produced literary interventions in restoration politics. The book profiles five environmental writers and examines how their writings on nature, wildness, wilderness, conservation, preservation, and restoration have variously inspired and been translated into ecological restoration programs and campaigns by environmental organizations. The featured authors are Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) at Walden Pond, John Muir (1838-1914) in Yosemite National Park, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) at his family’s Wisconsin sand farm, Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998) in the Everglades, and Edward Abbey (1927-1989) in Glen Canyon.

Laura's current research brings together cultural geographers and artists in a creative, interdisciplinary collaboration, to follow one tree species—pitch pine—through time, and in one place—Brister’s Hill in Walden Woods, Concord, Massachusetts. Brister's Hill, which together with the wider Walden Woods and Walden Pond, was central to the environmental philosophy of Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). The research addresses the challenge of how (and by whom) pitch pine stories are made, unmade, and remade—and the performativity and politics of these tree stories in an already heavily storied landscape. The project employs artistic research practices to make visible the complexity and agency of different histories and stories in the landscape, and generate new engagements and encounters with pitch pine.

Laura is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), and a Fellow of Advance HE (FHEA).

Laura is Geography's Director of UG Admissions, and BA Admissions Tutor.

Qualifications

PhD City and Regional Planning (Cardiff University, 2010)
MSc Social Science Research Methods (Cardiff University, 2006)
BSc (Hons) Geography (Human) and Planning (Cardiff University, 2004)

Term 1 Office Hours

Monday 15.00-16.00, in Amory C249A

Thursday 12.00-13.00, on Zoom

Please sign up for a slot here.