Claire Dwyer

Dwyer was born in Letchworth 1964[2] to Michael Dwyer and Brenda Jacques.[3] Her father was a research engineer and her mother was a teacher.[3] She became interested in social geography during her childhood in the garden city of Letchworth. Dwyer attended St Angela's Roman Catholic school in Stevenage.[3] She was an undergraduate student at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, graduating with a first-class geography degree from the University of Oxford in 1987.[3] During her undergraduate degree she spent a year working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta.[3] Dwyer completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at the University of Nottingham, and taught at secondary schools in Warminster. She returned to academia and studied for a master's degree in critical feminism at Syracuse University.[3] Her Master of Arts degree was awarded in 1991 for a dissertation on state-funded Muslim schools in the United Kingdom.[3] She then carried out her doctoral research at University College London;[4] supervised by Peter Jackson and Jacquie Burgess,[2] her PhD was awarded in 1997 for her thesis on the construction and contestations of Islam.[5]

Dwyer was a social geographer with research interests in "the intersections of migration and multiculturalism and geographies of religion and ethnicity".[6] She was also interested in gender and feminism.[2] Dwyer was appointed to a full lectureship in geography in 1997 and was promoted to a senior lectureship in 2007. She was made Reader in Human Geography in 2014 and promoted to Professor in Geography in 2018.[4] She was one of the first women to become a Professor of Human Geography in the United Kingdom. She was also co-director of the Migration Research Unit at UCL from 2010[6] and in that capacity was involved in the establishment of the global migration Master of Science programme.[2]

Dwyer married Paul Farmer, the CEO of Mind, in 1994.[3] Together they had two children, Ben and Thomas.[3] She worked to bring together suburban faith communities, and staged exhibitions as part of the Making Suburban Faith project. These occurred in Gunnersbury Park Museum and at Somerset House.[3] After being diagnosed with cancer in 2018, Dwyer died at a hospice in Ealing on 14 July 2019.[2]