Linda McDowell is currently Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. She was educated at Cambridge and London Universities and has worked at the Open University, Cambridge, LSE and UCL before moving to Oxford in 2004. She is an honorary fellow of the Gender Institute at the LSE and she was elected as an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2000. Her main research interests are in economic change, service sector growth, gender divisions of labour, organisational cultures, migration, global cities and feminist theory. She is author of many books including most recently Redundant Masculinities? Employment change and white working class youth (Blackwell 2003) and Hard Labour: the forgotten voices of Latvian migrant ‘volunteer’ workers (UCL Press 2005). She is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Servicing Bodies as part of a two year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, awarded form October 2007. She has contributed chapters on feminist analysis and methodology and economic change and the culture of work and organisations to many collections as well as published papers in a wide range of geographical journals.

Her papers and books have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. She has edited various journals including Area and Antipode, held the post of review editor for the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research as well as being a board member for seven years. She has also been on the editorial board of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Gender Place and Culture and the advisory board of the Journal of Economic Geography. She is currently a board member of Economic Geography and the Transactions of the Institute of British geographers as well as an editor of the Blackwell series Studies in Urban and Social Change and the OUP series Oxford Geographical and Environmental Studies. She has held visiting positions at the University of Southampton and at University of California, Los Angeles.