Rate My Professor Angharad Closs-Stephens

Angharad Closs Stephens is Associate Professor and Head of Geography at Swansea University in the School of Biosciences, Geography and Physics. She earned her PhD in International Relations from Keele University in 2008, an MRes in International Relations from Keele University in 2003, and an MSc in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics in 2001. Her academic career includes positions as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Durham University from 2007 to 2015, where she taught postgraduate and undergraduate modules. She has also taught at Keele University, Royal Holloway University of London, and Aberystwyth University. Closs Stephens has served as an external examiner at Aberystwyth University (2012-2016), University of Exeter (2019), and University of London (2024 onwards). She was a visiting scholar at Monash University's Emerging Technologies Lab in 2019 and a guest professor at the International Political Sociology Winter School at PUC-Rio in 2018. At Swansea, she is Director for Postgraduate Research in Geography, co-convenes the MSc in Society, Environment and Global Change with Dr Amanda Rogers, and acts as Pathway Leader for Human Geography for the Economic and Social Research Council. She chaired the Athena SWAN Geography Self-Assessment Team from 2016 to 2021, securing a Bronze Award in 2020, and convened the department's international seminar series from 2016 to 2019. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2021, she was nominated for the Outstanding Research Supervision Award in 2022, Research Culture Award for Creativity and Excellence in Learning and Teaching in 2023.

Closs Stephens specializes in Human Geography, with research interests encompassing critical approaches to nationalism, performance, art and politics, critical security studies, cultural and political geographies, cities and citizenship, affect and atmosphere. Her work explores global politics of nations and nationalism, security-identity relationships, and community responses to terrorism, supported by an ESRC Cherish-De escalator grant. She is the author of two monographs: National Affects: The Everyday Atmospheres of Being Political (Bloomsbury, 2022) and The Persistence of Nationalism: From Imagined Communities to Urban Encounters (Routledge, 2013). Notable publications include Collective Movements and Emerging Political Spaces (co-authored with M. Tazzioli, Routledge, 2023), 'Towards scholar-activism: transversal relations, dissent, and creative acts' (Citizenship Studies, 2023), 'Fast slow: Imagining climate futures beyond the end of the world' (Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2024), and 'Affect and the Response to Terror: Commemoration and Communities of Sense' (International Political Sociology, 2021). She received the Peer Review Prize for Excellence from International Political Sociology in 2017 and served as assistant editor of Citizenship Studies (2014-2017). Her contributions extend to field courses, such as one to Berlin, and public engagement through Welsh-language publications and expert commentary.