Julie Wilson

Dr Julie Wilson is associate Dean for Research and an Associate Professor (AQU) in the UOC's Faculty of Economics and Business, where she teaches the geography of tourism and sustainability. She began her academic career in the UK in 2002 when she earned a PhD in Human Geography from the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). She went on to be awarded two competitive mobility grants for predoctoral research stays at Aalborg University in Denmark and Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands from the British Council Netherlands/Dutch Research Council (NWO) programme. She gained valuable research experience while preparing her doctoral thesis as director of the EU Interreg 2C project "Marine Ecotourism for the Atlantic Area" and as a member of the research teams for various EU and international projects. She remained employed as a part-time senior researcher at UWE Bristol until 2014, during which time she gained funding for a number of individual and collaborative competitive research projects.

In 2003 she moved to Catalonia to begin her postdoctoral research thanks to the first of four international competitive grants (the Batista i Roca Anglo-Catalan Programme, AGAUR). In 2004 she was appointed to a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship postdoctoral post in the Geography Department of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). In 2009 she obtained a Beatriu de Pinós (AGAUR) postdoctoral contract, working closely once again with the GRATET group at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV). During this period she also received a Fulbright Schuman Advanced Research Award to fund a postdoctoral research stay at Columbia University in New York and at the City University of New York (CUNY), with visits to Harvard and Rutgers University. In 2009 she was accredited as a junior professor by the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (AQU), and in 2014 as an associate professor. In 2012 she was appointed a member of the Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change of the International Geographical Union (IGU-UGI).

With the GRATET group she has been part of the research team on five successive projects in the framework of the National Research and Development Plan and has co-organized four international events related to these projects in partnership with the Regional Studies Association, the International Geographical Union (IGU-UGI), the Association of Tourism and Leisure Education (ATLAS) and Working Group 10, on the Geography of Tourism, of the Association of Spanish Geographers (AGE).

In 2016 she joined the UOC's Faculty of Economics and Business as an associate professor, although she continues to collaborate with the URV's GRATET group. In 2017, with the UOC's sustainable tourism group, she was involved in the launch of the NOUTUR research group (headed by Lluís Garay), a new group in the SGR consolidated research groups programme, which is rapidly becoming established, gaining funding from the National Research and Development Plan for two projects in four years, related to tourism and the impact of the platform economy. In 2018 she led a transversal project on the sharing economy in the Faculty of Economics and Business, launched a monthly reading club on the subject and supervised the organization of the 7th International Workshop on the Sharing Economy at the UOC. In 2018 and 2021 she received accreditation for six-year research periods from 2003-2008 and 2015-2020 (AQU), and in 2019 her faculty appointed her as associate dean for research for her leadership skills in research in different areas. In recent years she has been gaining experience in the multilevel governance of sustainable tourism as a member of the advisory group for the Barcelona 2020 strategic tourism plan (2016) and as an external expert for the BleuTourMed project (Interreg MED, 2018-19).

In 2022 she was awarded the John Rooney Prize in recognition of her outstanding international contribution to studies of the geography of tourism, and in 2019 she was awarded the Roy Wolfe International Prize, both presented by the American Association of Geographers (AAG). In 2020 she was appointed chair of the IGU-UGI's Commission on Tourism, Leisure and Global Change, of which she had been a member in two previous periods. In 2019 she launched major research collaborations with two other prominent research groups at the UOC, TURBA and IdentiCat, via two EU projects (Horizon 2020 and HERA programmes), continuing her policy of always being involved with one or more competitive research projects to keep up her research work. In 2020 she received accreditation for her first teaching period (Docentia) from 2015-2020, and from 2017 to 2020 she set up and directed the RedINTUR joint doctoral degree programme in Tourism at the UOC.

Her research interests focus on the analysis of the role of tourism in the socio-spatial transformation of urban/rural landscapes, the role of culture and creativity in generating new forms of sustainability in tourism, the sharing and platform economies and evolutionary economic geography as interpretative frameworks for sustainable tourism. She has written ten books and more than forty journal articles and book chapters for leading publishers and is a member of the editorial boards of the JCR/SJR Q1 journals Tourism Geographies and Current Issues in Tourism, and makes frequent appearances at international academic conferences.