Until my retirement I was Peter Wall Distinguished Professor and also Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I was born in Britain but I’m now a Canadian citizen; I was educated and I taught at the University of Cambridge until moving to UBC in 1989; I’m a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada; and I’ve been awarded honorary degrees from one of Europe’s youngest (Roskilde) and oldest (Heidelberg) universities, and I’m also an Honorary Fellow of King’s College London.  More information here.

I now live in Burlington, Ontario, and although (because?) I’m retired, my research and writing continue apace.

For the record: despite the rise of what I now think of in the Age of Trump as anti-social media, I’m not on Facebook (I prefer real friends) and I don’t tweet (life is too full to be fitted into 140 characters, unless you are the ex-President of the United States); neither am I on academia.”edu” (you can find most of my recent writings and drafts under the DOWNLOADS tab).  You can still contact me at derek.gregory@ubc.ca.

Much of my research and writing since The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; reprinted 10 times) has concerned what I call later modern war.  I’m presently working on three research/book projects under that general umbrella, though I also hope to complete an essay setting out what I mean by ‘later modern war’ and what I take to be its key components.  The three substantive projects are:

Reach from the Sky: This is a study of the histories/geographies of bombing, focusing on three main campaigns: the combined bomber offensive against Germany in World War II, the US air wars over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and the the development of US aerial violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria and elsewhere.  Predators and Reapers are an important part of that last discussion, but the project also examines the move to much smaller drones during the Ukraine/Russia conflict and in Israel/Palestine.  The original research proposal (“Killing Space”) is available under the DOWNLOADS tab.  When I delivered the Tanner Lectures in Cambridge, this gave me the opportunity to bring my ideas together and to rework them, and I haven’t stopped yet…  You’ll find some of my most recent work (like “Midnight’s Victims”, on the last drone strike in Afghanistan before the US withdrawal) under the DOWNLOADS tab.

I’ve also undertaken a detailed reconstruction of what has become the canonical drone strike (in Uruzgan, Afghanistan in 2010) and I suspect that will have to become a book in its own right: you can find many of the preliminary versions and way-stations throughout the blog.

Woundscapes and Trauma Geographies:  This project examines how casualties (by which I mean both the wounded and the sick, both military and civilian) are treated in and evacuated from war zones, and the intersecting roles of military and civil-humanitarian medical machines in medical care and evacuation.  The study focuses on the Western Front in the First World War; the Western Desert of North Africa in the Second World War; Vietnam during the American war; and Afghanistan and Syria in the twenty-first century.  The original, draft proposal is available under the DOWNLOADS tab.  The project has ballooned so that the first part has become a book-length study, Woundscapes of the Western Front., but the other parts address what I call ‘trauma geographies’ more recently and more generally.

The death of the clinic: This book is at the intersection of the others; it addresses attacks on hospitals and medical facilities, principally from the air, through case studies on the Western Front in the First World War, Afghanistan, Syria and Gaza in the twenty-first century, and raises a series of vital questions about war zones as ‘spaces of exception’ and medical facilities as (supposedly) ‘exceptions to the exception’.  Again, you can find preliminary versions throughout the blog.

Most of the postings on this blog flow from these projects, but I do address other themes and topics from time to time.