Biography

Richard Dennis read Geography as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His PhD thesis, 'Community and social interaction in a Victorian city: Huddersfield, 1850-1880', prepared the way for a book on English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography (Cambridge University Press, 1984). After a year as Junior Research Fellow in Geography at the University of Sheffield, he was appointed Lecturer at UCL in 1974, and promoted to Reader in 1991. He has also spent periods as a Leverhulme Research Fellow and Research Associate at the University of Toronto (1986-87), as Visiting Lecturer in Geography at UCLA (1982), and as Visiting Professor at Macalaster College and the University of Minnesota (1991).

He was Associate Editor of Journal of Urban History from 1997 to 2007 and is on the Editorial Board of Urban History Review/Revue d'histoire urbaine. Until 2004 he was also a Series Editor of Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography (published by Cambridge University Press). Since 1993 he has been convener of the London Conference for Canadian Studies, and co-convener of the Metropolitan History Seminar at the University of London Institute of Historical Research, and in 2008 he became Secretary of the British Association for Canadian Studies. He is also an Associate Fellow of the University of London Institute for the Study of the Americas.

He was a member of the advisory committee of the three-volume Cambridge Urban History of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and has also served as an academic advisor for the Museum of London. He is also currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the London Journal, and of the Board of Management of the Centre for Metropolitan History.