Hilary Geoghegan

Professor Hilary Geoghegan is a cultural geographer who researches life in a climate change world, focussing on emotions, knowledge-making, and more-than-human relations. A consistent thread in Hilary’s work is imagining and building alternative futures that honour diverse ways of being, doing, and knowing. Informed by the NERC-funded Engaging Environments project and lived experience as a neurodivergent person, Hilary collaborates with colleagues and organisations on equity-centred research and contributes to more inclusive university cultures through the Staff Disability+ Network. 

Hilary’s research spans geographies of enthusiasm, examining how emotion, care, and passion shape and sustain engagement, from forest management and modernist architecture to museum collections. She also researches citizen science and public engagement, exploring how knowledge is made and how research can become equitable, including work on environmental monitoring, public history, and climate change. Conceptually, her work contributes to affirmative engagements with enchantment and critique in geography; methodologically, it develops creative ways of working with trees and collections, imagining a more-than-human approach to tree health and introducing curation as method.

Hilary has served as PI and Co-I on interdisciplinary projects on citizen science, climate change, public engagement, and tree health and plant biosecurity. Most recently, the NERC-funded Engaging Environments project (2019–2024) brought researchers and communities together to reimagine research collaboration through practices that prioritise equity and cultural relevance. Hilary received the RGS-IBG Gill Memorial Award (2018), has advised NERC, UKRI and DEFRA, has held editorial roles with Area and People and Nature, and is an academic advisor to the Museum of English Rural Life.