Alison McCleery obituary

My spouse, Alison McCleery, who has died aged 69 of breast cancer, was a professor of financial and cultural geography who specialised in analysis on the financial, social and cultural growth of the North Atlantic periphery.

Born and introduced up in Edinburgh, Alison was the daughter of Margaret (nee Shillinglaw) and George Bruce. Her father, a trainer of French and German, was also a eager amateur singer and musician, enthusiasms he passed on to his daughter. As a schoolgirl at Mary Erskine school, Alison played the french horn in an orchestra performed by Donald Runnicles (then a pupil at George Watson’s college or university) and when she moved to St Andrews College in 1972, she performed in the college orchestra although also singing in the chapel choir. It was at St Andrews that she and I met, and two a long time after Alison graduated with a very first class diploma in geography, we have been married in 1978.

Immediately after getting a PhD at Glasgow University, she turned a senior researcher in the Central Investigation Unit of the Scottish Advancement Office. In 1981 she switched to Edinburgh Napier University, in which she was to continue to be for 40 yrs, initial as a senior lecturer, then as a professor with a remit to boost its exploration track record.

Fluent in French and German, Alison was seconded from Napier to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and also to Insead in Paris. Elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Culture, she served as editor of the Scottish Geographical Journal and was traveling to professor at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, Paris. She served on the Populace Team of the Institute of British Geographers, performing for several many years as its secretary.

In addition she was on the Peripheral Regions Commission of the Worldwide Geographical Union, in which potential she travelled broadly, from the Falkland Islands to remote areas of China. Her past publication will seem posthumously afterwards in 2023.

Outdoors work Alison experienced a vibrant family members daily life, bringing up four little ones with the similar adore of singing and orchestral new music that experienced encouraged her, and for 22 several years spent every single summer months getaway in the identical village in Normandy so they would increase up with the exact same language fluency and adore of France as she had.

She is survived by me, and our young children, Catriona, Roderick, Neil and Alexander, and 3 grandsons, Angus, Archie and Max.