I can Never Be a ‘Retired’ Geographer

Brief Biography

Anngret Simms, born in 1937 in Rostock on the Baltic, is Professor Emeritus of the School of Geography at University College Dublin. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her long-term research interest is in the comparative study of the evolution of the landscape in Ireland and in East Central Europe, both regions that experienced colonization during the Middle Ages and beyond. Her ongoing research project is the joint editorship of The Irish Historic Towns Atlas (27 volumes so far and a number of ancillary publications). She is a member of the International Commission for the History of Towns and, jointly with Ferdinand Opll (Vienna) and Katalin Szende (Budapest), she coordinates the international Atlas Working Group set up by the Commission. Recently she published papers on comparative urban studies that attempt to explore the data made available by the European Historic Towns Atlas project. Her research questions concern the relative location of medieval churches and market-places, cartographically expressing a clear chronology of development; and the unity in diversity in comparative analyses of towns as far apart geographically as Kilkenny in Ireland and Sopron in Hungary, but linked by the unifying political and cultural system of medieval Europe. Most recently she jointly edited a substantial volume entitled Lords and Towns in Medieval Europe (2015) focusing on the contrast in urban development between the core of Europe and its periphery.