Jared Margulies

Jared Margulies is a lecturer in Environmental Governance in the Department of Geography at University College London. He is a human-environment geographer working at the intersections of political ecology, biodiversity conservation, and environmental (geo)politics. His major research focus since 2017 has focused on wildlife trade in ornamental plant life, with support of several external research grants, including a National Geographic Explorer Grant (2024) and Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund Grant, which was led by Dr. Annette Hübschle of the Global Risk Governance Programme at UCT. He has published in both peer-review outlets and more public fora with Dr. Hübschle on their ongoing work related to socio-ecological harm reduction and illegal succulent trade affecting rural communities in South Africa’s Northern and Western Cape provinces. Together, they have also organised panels at the 2023 POLLEN Conference in Durban, South Africa, as well as conducted fieldwork on succulent trade in both South Korea and South Africa.

Margulies' first book, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade, was published in 2023 by the University of Minnesota Press and has been widely reviewed and praised. The book's driving question was to understand why passionate plant collectors--people who presumably love ornamental cacti and succulents the most--would seemingly engage in activities that threaten them with extinction.

Prior to joining the faculty at UCL, he was an associate professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Alabama. Prior to Alabama, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield (2017-2019). He is an Associate Editor for the JournalConservation Society, and a Handling Editor at Conservation Biology. He has published widely in leading journals across the fields of political geography and political ecology, geopolitics, conservation, and human-environmental geography.

Degrees
PhD, Geography and Environmental Systems, University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), 2017
​MSc, Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management, University of Oxford, 2010
BA, Anthropology with minor in Environmental Studies, Goucher College, 2008