Staff spotlight: Arctic explorer

"I'VE BEEN LUCKY TO VOYAGE AROUND ANTARCTICA, THE PACIFIC, UP TO THE NORTH POLE ITSELF. WE NEED HEALTHY OCEANS LIKE NEVER BEFORE. ALL OF OUR LIVES DEPEND UPON OUR SHARED WORLD OCEANS. "

DR HUW LEWIS-JONES, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENVIRONMENT AND CULTURE

We could be a little biased, but we think you’ll agree when we say that we have some of the most fascinating lecturers working at Falmouth. From BAFTA-winning producers to acclaimed novelists, inspirational musicians and polar explorers, our academic staff members have a wealth of industry experience and connections.

Just take a look at Dr Huw Lewis-Jones, Associate Professor of Environment and Culture. He is an environmental historian and expedition leader who joined Falmouth in 2018.

Huw is a storyteller and seafarer, a field naturalist and wilderness guide, an award-winning author and teacher. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, directs research projects across the world, and leads voyages to challenging places. He’s a creative adventurer and conservation advocate, exploring new ways of thinking. Huw has written multiple best-selling books, which have been published in eighteen languages. He continues to work as an international photo editor, an art director, an academic researcher, sometimes as museum curator, and often as polar bear guard. These days he encourages his students to spend as much time as they can outside and offline.

He doesn’t just teach in lecture halls either. Huw can be found at festivals, on ships, by glaciers and on remote volcanic islands – from the South Pacific to the High Arctic. He likes to navigate boats into the ice, taking people north to see whales and polar bears in the wild, or south, to penguin rookeries, albatross colonies, and yet more ice.

Huw also curates photo exhibitions and has appeared in several BBC documentaries, including BBC4’s Everest Revealed: Imagining the Himalayas, Antarctica Natural Histories of Ice, and the three-part series Wilderness Explored: Arctic, Central Australia, Congo. He has also contributed to BBC 2’s Frank Wild: Surviving Antarctica, Channel 4’s Franklin’s Lost Ships, and ABC’s Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery.

He has been a Fellow at Harvard University and Curator of both the Scott Polar Research Institute and the National Maritime Museum in London. He won the Leif Erikson Award in 2015 for his advocacy of exploration, photography and wilderness heritage. Most recently, he was Green Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

BOOKS

Huw’s books include The Sea Journal, Explorers’ Sketchbooks, Imagining the Arctic, Archipelago, Ocean Portraits, The Lifeboat, The Crossing of Antarctica, In Search of the South Pole, The Conquest of Everest and The Writer’s Map, which picked up multiple prizes including the Stanford Award for Illustrated Book of the Year.

He’s just published a new anthology called Swallowed by a Whale. Commissioned by the British Library and edited by Huw, the collection includes contributions from sixty authors, who share their secrets and insights into their writing lives, including how they started out, their inspirations, methods, wild ideas and daily routines, as well as the pleasure and the pain in achieving their literary goals.