Professor Linda McDowell

MA (Cantab), MPhil (UCL), PhD (UCL), DLitt (Oxon), FBA, CBE

Privileges of a Fellow Emerita

College Roles

  • Privileges of a Fellow Emerita

Contact

Email: linda.mcdowell@geog.ox.ac.uk

Biography

Linda McDowell studied geography at Newnham before moving to UCL for her masters and PhD. She has held posts at the University of Kent, the Open University, Cambridge University, LSE and UCL before moving to Oxford in 2004. She is now Professor Emerita of Human Geography at Oxford University and Emerita Research Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. She was awarded the Victoria Medal by the Royal Geographical Society in 2014 for her research in human geography, focusing on the changing nature of employment in Britain.

Research Interests

Professor McDowell is an ethnographer of work and employment with interests in the connections between economic restructuring and divisions of labour in Great Britain, in migration and in feminist theory and methodology. She is currently finishing a Leverhulme Trust-funded study of inequality and (un)employment in English coastal towns. Over the years, she has completed a range of studies involving interviews, including with bankers in the City of London, with young unskilled men searching for employment, with European migrant women workers in the immediate post World War II period, with South Asian women strikers in the 1970s, as well as a large study of women migrants who came to seek work in the UK between 1945 and 2010. This was published as a monograph Migrant Women’s Voices by Bloomsbury in 2016.