Rate My Professor George Burdon

Dr. George Burdon serves as a Lecturer in Cultural Geography within the School of Science at UNSW Canberra, University of New South Wales, a position he assumed in February 2022. He earned his PhD in Geography from the University of New South Wales in 2022, an MSc in Human Geography: Society and Space from the University of Bristol in 2017, and a BSc (Hons) in Geography with Study in Continental Europe from the University of Bristol in 2015. Burdon also pursued studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, underscoring his international academic exposure in human geography.

Burdon's scholarship as a human geographer is informed by continental philosophy and social theory, with empirical interests centered on sound art, music, and sonic experience. His research advances debates on attention, affect, desire, and subjectivity by engaging philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and Félix Guattari. These explorations manifest in analyses of ambient music, sound art projects, drone music, and experimental composition. His publications appear in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Cultural Geographies, Geography Compass, Area, and Social & Cultural Geography. Key works include the journal article 'On being affected: Desire, passion, and the question of conatus after Spinoza and Deleuze' (Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2022), 'Immunological atmospheres: Ambient music and the design of self-experience' (Cultural Geographies, 2023), 'Writing subjectivity without subjecthood: the machinic unconscious of Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms' co-authored with Nina Williams (Social & Cultural Geography, 2022), 'Just Beyond Listening: Essays of Sonic Encounter' (Cultural Geographies, 2024), 'Sound Art Geographies: Listening at the Limits of Audibility' (Geography Compass, 2025), 'Displaced attention: Bergson, attentive habits and Tony Conrad's drone music' (Area, 2025), and the book chapter 'Against the cynicism of common sense: Guattari and the micropolitics of expression' in Speculative Geographies: Ethics, Technologies, Aesthetics (2022). Burdon's research specializations encompass Cultural Geography, Geographies of Sound and Music, Non-representational Theory, Affect Theory, and Media and Subjectivity.