Dr Robert Winstanley-Chesters is an AKS Teaching and Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to this Robert worked as a Lecturer at York St John University, Bath Spa University, University of Leeds, Birkbeck, University of London, as a Research Fellow at Australian National University (under Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki's ARC Laureate Fellowship project 'Informal Life Politics in the Remaking of Northeast Asia') and as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge (under Professor Heonik Kwon's AKS Lab project 'Beyond the Korean War'). Robert obtained a BD in Divinity from Edinburgh in 1998, and an MA and PhD in Human Geography from the University of Leeds in 2008/2013. Robert’s PhD thesis is titled Ideology and the Production of Landscape in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Robert is the author of the monographs Environment, Politics and Ideology in North Korea (Lexington, 2014), Vibrant Matter(s): Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Her Neighbours (Springer, 2020) and New Goddess on Mt Paektu: Myth and Transformation in North Korean Landscape (Black Halo/Amazon KDP, 2020). Robert was also co-editor of Change and Continuity in North Korean Politics (Routledge, 2016).
I am currently researching North Korea necro-mobilities and other difficult or unwelcome bodies and materials in Korea/East Asian historical geography, work which I have published in a variety of academic journals and my monograph Vibrant Matter(s): Fish, Fishing and Community in North Korea and Her Neighbours. I am also researching the processes and landscapes of geographic knowledge production, fieldwork and theory during the Japanese Imperial and Korean colonial era. This work is the subject of a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Historical Geography, and in a forthcoming monograph project, co-authored with Dr Adam Cathcart of the University of Leeds.