Our People

Professor Danny Dorling

A headshot

Professor Danny Dorling

  • Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography
  • Professorial Fellow

Danny Dorling is a professor in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He was previously a professor for a decade at the University of Sheffield, and before then at the University of Leeds. He has also worked as an academic in Newcastle and Bristol. He was born and brought up in Oxford. In 2020 he published Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives and in 2021, jointly with Annika Koljonen: Finntopia: what we can learn from the world’s happiest country. His 2023 book is titled Shattered Nation: Inequality, and the geography of a failing state. In 2024, Danny published two new books Seven Children and Peak Injustice. Danny is a patron of the road crash charity RoadPeace, of Heeley City Farm in Sheffield, and of the educational campaign group Comprehensive Future. In his spare time he makes sandcastles on beeches with clean streams and the right kind of sand. He errs towards being optimistic about the future, because his academic work suggests, to him, that this is the most rational stance to take – despite what you may see around you.

Much of Danny’s work is available open access (see www.dannydorling.org).