ProfessorWilliam Pritchard

Bill Pritchard is a Professor of Geography in the School of Geosciences. He has dedicated his research career to the changing human environments of rural places in the contemporary world. His research has sought to unveil the ways that emergent global circulations of goods, services and populations are transforming places, industries and people's lives, with a specific interest in how these are manifesting in changed patterns of nutrition and hunger.

He has researched these themes in Australia, and in Southeast and South Asia. India has been a specific focus of his research interests. Over more than two decades he has worked with Indian colleagues to document the massive transformations occurring currently across the length and breadth of the country.

Bill carries with him a geographer's passion to understand our world using the tools of field-based research, and in particular, to listen to the voices of those affected by processes of change. His goal is to understand how places are forged through the cluttter of geographical circumstance, biophysical environments, historical processes and institutional practices. Bill describes homself as a skeptical internationalist - believing in the promise of a better world but frustrated by the obstacles that beset this objective.

Bill commenced as a lecturer at the University of Sydney in 1998. Since that time has has been the author or editor of 30 books and monographs, and has 120 refereed journal articles and book chapters to his name. (See Google Scholar profile here.) Since 2010 he has been involved in projects worth a total of $3.1 million in research funding, and acted as the leader for $1.375 million of this amount. From 2015-18 he conjontly held the title of International (Visiting) Profesor at the University of Cologne, Germany, attached to the Institute of Geography and the Global South Studies Centre.

Bill owes his career as a geographer to his fascination with maps and atlases, which are some of his earliest memories. He still spends far too much time being distracted by google maps. He's a passionate kayaker (living in Sydney being the best place in the world to have a kayaking interest), Sydney Roosters NRL fan (born in the eastern suburbs), and lover of travel, especially to India. In addition to his own extensive research-related visits to India, he has co-led four undergraduate field schools to India since 2015, involving approximately 100 University of Sydney students.