Welcoming Dr Ayona Datta to the Faculty as Professor of Human Geography

The Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Ayona Datta as Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography. Dr Datta is currently Reader in Urban Futures in King’s College London, with an international reputation in urban and feminist geography. She conducts theoretically informed, empirically rich research and has cross cutting expertise in postcolonial urbanism, smart cities, urban futures, and gender citizenship. She is the author of The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement (2012), and co-editor of Translocal geographies: Spaces, places, connections (2011) and Mega-urbanization in the global South: Fast cities and new urban utopias of the postcolonial state (2017). Dr Datta is also a publicly engaged scholar with a strong media presence and maintains a personal blog, 'The city inside out'. For her contributions to the understanding of smart cities through fieldwork, she was awarded the Busk Medal from the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) earlier this year. Prior to joining academia, she practiced as an architect in Delhi and London.