Professor Emerita Linda Peake

Linda Peake  FRSC is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is a feminist urban geographer who has engaged in urban theory production and conducted empirically informed research on women in cities in both North America and the Anglo-speaking Caribbean, and in particular in Guyana, addressing issues confronting women in relation to economic policies, poverty, violence, and subject formation. She also has long standing interests in whiteness and on developing anti-racist practices in Geography and feminist methodologies, particularly in terms of the work these do in transnational feminist praxis. Her interests in knowledge production also extend to issues of engaging with people experiencing mental and emotional distress and she is co-founder and previous co-chair of the AAG Affinity Group on Mental Health. Until 2025 she was the Principal Investigator of Urbanization, Gender, and the global south: a transformative knowledge network (GenUrb) and a board member of the Urban Studies Foundation and previous Director of the City Institute at York University (2013-2013). She is a previous editor of the journals Gender, Place and Culture and Social and Cultural Geography and her most recent publications include Decolonising Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures (with Nasya Ravazi, Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin and Elsa Koleth), Doing Feminist Urban Research: Insights from the GenUrb Project (with Araby Smyth and Nasya Razavi) and the Elgar Handbook on Gender and Cities (with Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin and Anindita Datta). Linda’s work has been recognised by York University with The Linda Peake Endowment Fund for Feminist Urban Research, the York University President’s Research Excellence Award, the Canadian Association of Geographers with their main Award for Scholarly Distinction in Geography and the AAG Lifetime Achievement Honors. In 2022 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.