Nigel Thrift

Sir Nigel John Thrift, DL, FBA, FAcSS (born 12 October 1949 in Bath) is a British academic and geographer. In 2016 he became Executive Director of the Schwarzman Scholars, an international leadership program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, having served in the position from 2006 to 2016, and a leading academic in the field of human geography.

Born in 1949, and educated at Nailsea School south west of Bristol, Thrift then studied geography at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and did his PhD at the University of Bristol. Thrift has held posts at numerous universities, including the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, the University of Wales, Lampeter, the University of Bristol, and the University of Oxford.

In 2005 he was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Warwick, taking up the position in July 2006. He intended to retire at the end of the university’s 50th anniversary year in 2015, but extended by a month to the end of January 2016.

Thrift was knighted in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to higher education.

Thrift has been described as one of the world's leading human geographers and social scientists, and is credited with coining the phrase soft capitalism as well as originating non-representational theory. Thrift sits on a number of advisory committees for the UK government and was a member of the ESRC Research Priorities Board. In 1982 he co-founded the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space whilst serving as managing editor, since 1979, of Environment and Planning A.

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