Mark Cleary

Mark Cleary was born in Birmingham into a large Roman Catholic family. Seven of the eight children in the family were educated at a range of Catholic boarding schools and convents through a variety of assisted places and scholarship schemes. This background has meant he has a good understanding of the nature, content and context of Catholic boarding education. This has informed the writing of Educating in Faith, though it should be stressed that the book is not in any way a personal memoir.

Mark was educated at a Franciscan prep school and at Ratcliffe College, Leicester from where he gained an Exhibition to read geography at Jesus College, Cambridge. He obtained a Double First and a doctorate in historical geography from the University of Cambridge. He has had lecturing posts at the universities of Exeter, Brunei Darussalam, and Waikato, New Zealand and was a Professor of Geography and deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Plymouth and Vice Chancellor of the University of Bradford before his retirement.

He has published a wide range of research papers as well as books with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Macmillan and Routledge in the fields of French history, the geography of Southeast Asia and development studies. One of the themes of his research has been the social, economic and political impact of Catholicism in a range of different historical contexts and this intellectual background has helped to inform Educating in Faith.