Harriet Hawkins is a geographer whose research interests focus on the geographies of art works and art worlds. She is interested in the contributions that the study and practice of contemporary art can make to geographical debates, and the value of geographical concepts to understandings of art theory, practice and history.

Themes of her research include; creative geographies; landscape and environment; rubbish and waste; art, the body and experience; creative mapping; documentation, archive and practice; site and space; and matter and materiality. Alongside academic writing Harriet has also curated exhibitions and worked collaboratively to produce art works, she has been involved with such organizations as Tate Britain, Iniva (Institute for International Visual Arts) and PVA/ Lab Culture, a Digital Media Group. Her research has been funded by the AHRC, the British Academy and the Royal Geographical Society and has been published in journals across Geography, the Humanities and Social Sciences.

She has recently joined the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University of London and has also lectured in Geography, Art and Visual Culture at the University of Nottingham (UK) and the University of Exeter (UK), and was a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol (UK).