Gavin Bridge is an economic and resource geographer whose research centers on the extractive industries of oil, gas and mining. He completed an undergraduate degree in Geography at the University of Oxford in 1991, and holds a PhD from the Graduate School of Geography at Clark Univesity, Massachusetts. At the core of his research is a desire to understand the spatial and temporal dynamics of natural resource development. Through work on extractive resources, his work problematizes the treatment of biophysical processes within modern economic geography, a field that has largely defined itself by bracketing out 'nature' as an object of inquiry. His work on the geographical political economy of natural resources has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the British Academy, and the UK Energy Research Centre.
His research includes work in the Americas on the land-use changes associated with mining exploration and investment, research on organizational and geographical restructuring of the international oil sector, and a collaborative project to understand the implications for UK energy security of an evolving 'global' market for natural gas. He received a Marie Curie Reintegration Grant in 2006 to carry out archival research on the export of capital for mining development at the end of the 19th century, a project which he began while on a Ciriacy-Wantrup Natural Resources Fellowship at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the Editor of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and was previously Editor of Geoforum from 2009 to 2012.
He is co-founder and Chair of the Energy Geographies Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, and a member of the Editorial Boards of Political Geography and Mineral Economics. He is the co-author (with Philippe Le Billon) of Oil (Polity Press) which examines the new geopolitics of oil. He has been at Manchester since 2005, and worked previously at the Universty of Oklahoma (1997-2003) and Syracuse University, New York (2003-2005). From April 2013 he will be Professor of Geography at Durham University, based in the Department of Geography and associated with the Durham Energy Institute. He will remain an active member of ENTITLE following his move to Durham.