Anne Buttimer

Anne Buttimer (born 31 October 1938) is an Irish geographer. She is emeritus professor of geography at University College, Dublin.

Buttimer grew up in Ireland with strong Catholic convictions. She studied at University College Cork (BA, geography, Latin and mathematics 1957) and the National University of Ireland (master's in geography, 1959). After this, she joined the Dominican Order and moved to Seattle. She remained in the order for 17 years. Her PhD in geography was from the University of Washington in 1965 and concerned conceptual and methodological foundations for social geography. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Louvain and from 1966 to 1968 worked as an assistant professor at the University of Seattle. She spent two years at the University of Glasgow working in the social geography of housing, before joining Clark University from 1970–1981 where she firmly established a reputation as a social geographer and social scientist. In 1982 she was based in Lund as a research fellow of the Swedish Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, then briefly a professor at the Université d'Ottawa (1989–91) before moving to University College Dublin 1991–2003. A multilingual scholar (English, Gaelic, French, Latin, Swedish...?), she has also held numerous short-term positions in Europe.

She was president of the IGU 2000–2004 and the first geographer to be vice-president of Academia Europaea in 2012.

In the early part of her career, the quantitative revolution occupied social scientists, and Buttimer trained in this tradition before moving beyond it towards philosophical themes at the intersection of the bio-physical and human sciences. These shaped her research directions in spirituality, social geography, and particularly the documentation of everyday life experiences. These areas served as a model for the ways in which geographers can bridge the theory-practice divide.

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