Professor Ash Amin

Born on 31 October in 1955, Professor Ash Amin is a British Pakistani academic known for his writing on urban and regional development, contemporary cultural change, progressive politics, and the collaborative economy. He has held Fellowships and Visiting Professorships at a number of European Universities. He holds the 1931 chair at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. Since September 2015 he has held the post of foreign secretary of the British Academy.

Amin has lived in the South Asian community of Kenya until the age of 16, when he emigrated with his family to settle in Britain. He finished his schooling at Stratford Grammar School in London. He graduated from the University of Reading in 1979 with a degree in Italian Studies and then gained a PhD in geography from Reading in 1986.

Ash Amin is a geographer, interested in the geographies of contemporary social, political and economic change and their effects on situated life, autonomy and identity. His research has been based mainly in Europe, but is increasingly focusing on informal settlements in the developing world. His career started at Newcastle University in 1982. He was a Research Fellow and Research Associate at the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies and also a Lecturer and later a Professor in the Department of Geography.

In 2005, he left Newcastle for Durham University, where he was head of the geography department and the founding Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study. In 2011, Ash Amin was appointed as 1931 Chair in Geography at University of Cambridge and became a professorial Fellow of Christ's College.

He is known for his work on the geographies of modern living, cities and regions as relationally constituted, globalisation as everyday process, the economy as cultural entity, race and multi-culture as a hybrid of bio-politics and vernacular practices.

He has been founding co-editor of the Review of International Political Economy, and is currently associate editor of City, and on the advisory board of a number of international journals. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the British Academy. He is currently Director of Research in the Department of Geography.

In recent years, funded research has included grants from the ESRC on the ethnography of the UK social economy, while policy work has focused on urban and social cohesion, with independent scholarship focusing on race, cities, and democratic renewal. Professor Ash Amin is currently working on cultures of risk, on the city as machine, and on slum ecologies.