Hawkins' research is focused on the advancement of the geo-humanities, a field that sits at the intersection of geographical scholarship with arts and humanities scholarship and practice. Empirically, she explores the geographies of art works and art worlds.[11]
At Royal Holloway, she is also founder and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Geo-Humanities with Veronica Della Dora. The centre connects arts and humanities scholars and practitioners, geographers and the creative and cultural sectors. It encourages work with an arts and humanities perspective on issues that have a strong geographical resonance, such as space, place, landscape, and environment. Its over 50 members include: Felix Driver, Robert Hampson, Julian Johnson, and Jo Shapcott.[13][14]
She has delivered over 60 invited lectures, keynotes and plenaries in 16 countries, and examined over 30 doctoral theses in nine countries.[20] In April 2019, Hawkins delivered the Cultural Geographies Annual Lecture, titled Going Underground: Creating Subterranean Imaginations, at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.[21] In July 2020, she will be a plenary speaker at The Institute of Australian Geographers annual conference.[22]
In December 2019, it was announced that Hawkins was one of 301 researchers, across all disciplines and from 24 countries, selected from 2,453 applicants for the award of a prestigious five-year European Research Council Consolidator Grant, as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, for her project Thinking Deep – Novel creative approaches to the underground, providing funding of up to €2 million.[23][24]
Honours and awards
European Research Council Consolidator Grant, Thinking Deep – Novel creative approaches to the underground (2020–2025)[9]
Cultural Geographies Annual Lecture, Going Underground: Creating Subterranean Imaginations (2019)[21]
Dialogues and doings: Sketching the relationships between geography and art. Geography Compass (2011)
'The argument of the eye'? The cultural geographies of installation art.Cultural Geographies (2010)
References
^Hawkins, Harriet (2006). Geographies of Art and Rubbish: An Approach to the Work of Richard Wentworth, Tomoko Takahashi and Michael Landy (PhD thesis). Nottingham, England: University of Nottingham.