Ann Varley

• PhD: University College London – Prize-winning thesis on land and housing in urban Mexico

• Lecturer, Department of Geography, UCL
• Professor of Human Geography, UCL
• Director, UCL Gender and Sexuality Studies

• University of Roskilde, Denmark – Lecturer/Examiner
• University of Copenhagen, Denmark – Lecturer/Examiner
• Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim – Lecturer/Examiner
• University of Texas at Austin, USA – Conference participation / PhD examination
• American University of Beirut, Lebanon – Urban studies events
• Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Spain – Workshops
• Various institutions in Latin America, Canada, Chile, France, Lesotho, and Egypt – Lectures, workshops, and research collaboration

• 1985: British-Mexican Society Postgraduate Prize
• 2003: Christensen Fellowship, St Catherine’s College, Oxford
• 2003: Individual residency, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center
• 2007: University of London Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of the Americas
• 2010: Busk Medal, Royal Geographical Society
• 2014: Nominated for UCLU Student Choice Teaching Awards: Outstanding Teacher

• Editorial board: Home Cultures, Investigaciones Geográficas, Revista Sociológica
• ESRC Peer Review College, Norwegian Research Council, Commonwealth Scholarship Commission
• Led Translation Prize and mentoring workshops to support early-career Latin American geographers

• Lourdes Toledo Tapia – Microenterprise programmes for women in Guadalajara, Mexico (CONACYT-funded).
• David Zarra – The aftermath of the Spanish building boom and the meaning of ‘home’.
• Fernando Gutiérrez Hernández – Urban regeneration and the Alameda Central, Mexico City (joint supervision with Paulo Drinot).
• Rasa Kamarauskaitė – Daily negotiation of homosexual visibility in Lithuania.

• Nina Laurie – Women and emergency employment in Peru; now Professor, University of St Andrews.
• José Francisco Bernardino Freitas – Streets in low-income residential areas in Vitória, Brazil; now architect and lecturer, Universidade Federal de Espírito Santo.
• Liz Gooster – Gender, migration and households in Guadalajara, Mexico; now a business coach.
• Tanja Haque – Vocational training and women’s empowerment in Bangladesh; now development consultant.
• Kuheli Mookerjee – Displacement and resettlement in India’s Narmada Valley; now Regeneration Manager, Homes and Communities Agency (UK).
• Emmeline Skinner – Older people and urban poverty in Bolivia; now Social Development Advisor, FCDO, Nairobi.
• Emily Wilkinson – Decentralised disaster management in the Yucatán, Mexico; now Senior Research Fellow, ODI.
• Ben Flower – Donor-funded urban titling in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; now urban development practitioner with UN-Habitat.
• Fatema Jahan – Clothing consumption practices of women factory workers in Bangladesh; now lecturer, University of the West of Scotland.
• Lo Marshall – Experiences of trans people in Britain; now Postdoctoral Fellow in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, UCL.
• Tania Guerrero Rios – Financialised housing and urban containment in Mexico City; now urban planner, North Holland Provincial Government.
• Nandita Dutta – South Asian beauty salons in London and diasporic space; now postdoctoral researcher, University of Osnabrück.
• Marco Venturi – Re-thinking London’s gay community; now works in Student Services, University of Greenwich.
• Aydan Greatrick – Queer refugees from Syria in Lebanon and Germany; completed ESRC-funded PhD, second supervisor: Ann.
• Marcela López Mares – Governmentality and facility provision in Ciudad Satélite; now lecturer, Universidad Autónoma de San Luís Potosí, Mexico.

• Housing Tenure and the Urban Poor in Third World Cities
  Funding: Overseas Development Administration | Duration: 1985–1987 (with Alan Gilbert)
• Gendered Housing: Identity and Independence in Urban Mexico
  Funding: ESRC | Duration: 1997–2000 | Evaluation: Outstanding

• Professor Varley’s work has consistently centred on housing and home, particularly in urban Mexico.
• She examines urban informality, including titling programmes designed to provide security of tenure in informal settlements.
• Her research highlights Mexico’s long history of mass regularisation, offering a unique context for assessing the impact of titling.
• She emphasises the need to foreground residents’ own experiences, noting that this is often neglected in international policy debates.

Her research interests are reflected in four co-authored/edited books, including:

• The first book-length study of rental housing in Latin America.
• An edited collection on law and urban change in the global south, later translated with Swedish development cooperation funding and published in Bolivia as a resource for urban planning programmes in Latin America.
• Decoding Gender, translated by the gender studies programme of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with support from the UN Development Fund for Women.

In recent years, Professor Varley has expanded her research to South America, developing two key strands:

• Industrial heritage and cultural property in relation to Britain’s historical involvement in the Atacama region of northern Chile, focusing particularly on railway heritage and a dispute over a locomotive built in Leeds for the nitrate mines of Tarapacá.
• The recognition of same-sex marriage in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, emphasising the importance of home and inheritance in activism and legislation.

She is also interested in the wider implications of her work for the regulation of intimate relationships, particularly from the perspective of women in informal heterosexual unions.

• Over forty years of social research in urban Mexico, with a focus on housing, land tenure, and the use of household surveys, interviews, discussion groups, and life histories.
• Produced an OECD report assessing the impact of reforms to Mexico’s agrarian laws on urban housing, marking Mexico’s accession in 1994.
• Authored an assessment of women’s role in self-help housing for UNIFEM and Mexico’s Social Development Secretariat.
• Contributed to a joint report by Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (Mexico) and the University of Texas on families in the Mexico–US border region.

• Research on older people’s living arrangements led to an ESRC-funded CASE studentship with HelpAge International.
• Work on land tenure formalisation supported the case for a UCL Impact Award co-sponsored by the Cambodian Development Resource Institute (CDRI).
• Contributed a think piece, “Feminism’s pale shadows,” to a report published by the International Longevity Centre–UK for International Women’s Day.

A conference on disasters that she organised for the Royal Geographical Society brought together three Latin America-focused experts, leading to the creation of La Red de Estudios Sociales en Prevención de Desastres en América Latina.

• Used her language skills extensively in outreach work, including translating a report by an international commission of experts on “Strategies for sustainable socio-economic development of the Doñana Region” (Andalucía).
• This translation contributed to the creation of the first Plan for Sustainable Development of the protected wetlands.
• Has also served as a volunteer translator for an international housing rights NGO.

• Engages with key questions raised by the United Nations Global Campaign for Secure Tenure, which recognises that “securing tenure for the household does not necessarily secure tenure for women and children.”
• Her work explores how this insight should be translated into practice.