Georgia State University, United States
Kevin Ward is Director of the Urban Studies Institute and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Manchester, UK.
Before joining GSU, he was the founding director of the Manchester Urban Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. This was a cross-departmental initiative involving academics and students working on urban issues worldwide. He established the Summer Institute in Urban Studies (SIUS) in conjunction with colleagues at the University of Manchester, and after three years in Manchester (2014, 2015, 2016), he subsequently oversaw partnerships with the National University of Singapore in 2018), York University and the University of Toronto (2020/2023) and Ghent University, KU Leuven, Vrije Universiteit Brussels and the University of Antwerp (2025).
Ward’s research interests center on comparative urbanism, municipal finance, policy mobility studies and urban governance. He is the author and editor of a number of books and author of over eighty book chapters and journal articles, including publications in all the usual places.
He is a former chair of the Urban Geography Specialty Group of the AAG, and currently editor in chief at Urban Geography and editor of the Globalization and Community Series at the University of Minnesota Press, with his colleague and friend, Professor Mark Davidson at Clark University. Alongside Mark, Dr. Ward has also been researching the politics around fiscal governance in Buffalo, NY, Nashville, TN, and San Jose, CA for Red Ink Urbanism, their forthcoming monograph at the University of Minnesota Press.