If we take a cultural geography approach to literature, we see the role of place in stories as active and vibrant. My work in this area started with the publication ‘Page and Place: Ongoing Compositions of Plot’ (published by Rodopi in 2014), and has developed into an AHRC funded project entitled ‘A New Literary Geography: Establishing a Digital Literary Atlas of Wales and its Borderlands’ (2016-2018). A series of exhibitions displayed the range of outputs from this project, and an exhibition catalogue can be enjoyed here. A monograph on this work, ‘Literary Atlas: Plotting a new Literary Geography’ was published by Routledge in 2025, and you can find out all about the project, and its exhibitions, here: www.literaryatlas.wales . A short excerpt from the monograph follows below:

Over recent years, scholars from a range of modern disciplines have embarked on exciting adventures in the world of literary geographies. This book, Literary Atlas: Plotting a New Literary Geography, engages with these adventures, whilst also charting its own journey into these challenging new worlds. The book shares insights from Literary Atlas, a project which sought to ‘plot’ new readings of English language novels set in Wales, and as it does so, critiques the framework in which academic endeavours in this subject area have been understood. More specifically, the book offers a new reading of the contemporary emergence of, and possible futures for, literary geographies. Counter to the growing consensus which suggests that literary geography (notably in the singular) is and should be a discipline forged through the nexus of its two titular subject areas (namely human geography and literary studies), this book offers an alternative reading of the subject. It argues that literary geographies (in the plural) have undergone an explosion of innovation in recent years not as a consequence of the formal coming together of two disciplines, but due to the confluence of a range of philosophical changes that have stimulated interest in the subject from a range of subject areas (including, for example, cartography, the creative humanities, cultural sociology, human geography, literary studies, and print cultures, to name several). To this beginning, this book formally counters disciplinary metaphors of ‘territory’ and ‘turns’ to adopt the more ‘fluid’ metaphors of ‘sea changes’ and ‘currents’ to story the context of philosophical change in which literary geographies are mobilising. The book suggests that, due to the influence of these conceptual changes and currents, literary geographies are far from being a ‘stable’ disciplinary category (after Tally, 2019: 292), and are enjoying perfect storm conditions for their continued development. The book argues that the future of this interdiscipline should be premised upon nurturing this instability, turbulence, and experimentation in order to produce new insights which could change the way we understand not only the relations between literature and place, but also between other modern categories, including academic disciplines.