David Harvey

David W. Harvey FBA (born 31 October 1935) is the Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.

In 2007, Harvey was listed as the 18th most-cited author of books in the humanities and social sciences in that year, as established by counting cites from academic journals in the Thomson Reuters ISI database. On that basis, the books of Harvey were cited 723 times in 2007. In a study of the most-cited academic geographers in four English-speaking countries between 1984 and 1988, Harvey ranked first.

Education

Harvey attended Gillingham Grammar School for Boys and St John's College, Cambridge (for both his undergraduate and post-graduate studies). Harvey's early work, beginning with his PhD (on hops production in 19th century Kent), was historical in nature, emerging from a regional-historical tradition of inquiry widely used at Cambridge and in Britain at that time. Historical inquiry runs through his later works (for example on Paris).