Dr Huw Lewis-Jones
Senior Lecturer
Dr Huw Lewis-Jones is an environmental historian and expedition leader.
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 is a creative adventurer and conservation advocate, exploring new ways of thinking.
Huw has written best-selling books that have now 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. His first ever job was as a beach cleaner. These days he encourages his students to spend as much time as they can outside and offline.
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 is currently at work on new collections – Swallowed by a Whale, and The Animal Image – and a larger ongoing research project relating to wild nature and environmental histories of photography.
In recent years Huw has been teaching in lecture halls, 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 BBC documentaries. 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.
In 2018 Huw became the new Senior Lecturer at Falmouth University, where he teaches his students about culture, history, conservation, and creativity. He is based in the Institute of Photography but also works with creative partners across many time-zones. He can mostly be found making books and messing about in boats.