John Pickles currently serves as the Phillips Distinguished Professor of International Studies in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Pickles attended the University of Oxford, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in Geography, with a minor in Geology, and a master's degree in Geography. He later earned doctorate degrees from the University of Natal, South Africa, and the Pennsylvania State University, United States. Pickles is a scholar in the areas of critical cartography, phenomenology, geography of media and communication and post-socialist spaces. He is the author of numerous books, including Phenomenology, Science, and Geography: Space and the Human Sciences, Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographical Information Systems, and A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World.