Professor Veronica della Dora from the Department of Geography has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in recognition for her work in Geography and in Byzantine Studies.

Veronica’s research lies at the intersection between Geography and the Humanities. Much of her past work explored the way in which places are imagined and represented, and how they circulate through space and time by way of visual and textual media. Her first monograph, Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer to World War II (University of Virginia Press, 2011, shortlisted for the Criticos Prize 2012) charted the history of Christian Orthodoxy’s Holy Mountain in the Orthodox and Western geographical imagination by way of ancient Greek and Byzantine literature, Renaissance maps, travel accounts, botanists’ observations, and testimonies of World-War-II Allied refugees, among other sources.

Her more recent research has focussed especially on perceptions of nature and sacred space. Her latest publications include Mountain: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books, 2016) and Landscape, Nature and the Sacred in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016, shortlisted for the Runciman Award 2017).  

She is currently working on a monograph on the genealogy of the ‘mantle of the Earth’ as a metaphor for shifting perceptions of global space, from Classical antiquity to the digital present. Research for the project has been generously funded by a Senior Research Fellowship of the British Academy and a residential fellowship from the Onassis Foundation.

With Professor Harriet Hawkins, Professor della Dora co-directs the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities.