Erik Swyngedouw holds a PhD in Geography and Environmental Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He also holds Master's Degrees in both Bioengineering and Urban & Regional Planning from the University of Leuven.
He is currently Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester, UK. He previously held a professorship at Oxford University. He is also visiting professor at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He has worked and taught in the USA, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Ecuador, and Greece.
His research focuses on political ecology and political economy, with a particular interest in theorizing the society-nature articulation from a broadly historical-geographical materialist analysis. In addition, he has worked on urban socio-ecological dynamics, urban governance, politics of scale, and the geographical dynamics of advanced capitalist society. He has worked extensively on issues of water and water politics, and the political ecology of water and urbanization. Recent work focuses on the democratic politics and the strategies and tactics of new political movements, and the political ecology of desalination.
He has published over 100 academic papers in leading academic journals in geography and cognate disciplines and in scholarly books. He has authored or co-edited a series of books, among which Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (Oxford University Press, 2004), The Globalized City (edited with F. Moulaert and A. Rodriguez), In the Nature of Cities (edited with N. Heynen and M. Kaika).
Forthcoming books include a monograph on the political ecology of water in Spain (forthcoming with MIT Press) and Spectres of the Political (edited with J. Wilson, Edinburgh University Press).
He likes listening to all sorts of good music (rock, jazz, classical, opera), getting lost in big cities, debating radical politics, and cooking good food to share with friends.