Alexander James Kent

In 2021, The Red Atlas was featured by the Map Men in an educational video about Soviet mapping, which became the third highest trending video on YouTube shortly after it was released on 11 January.

In 2020, Kent became a senior fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Davies and Kent have presented their research at the Lenin Library in Moscow, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Washington, DC, the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester, and at Eton College, where they were invited by the Slavonic Society in 2019.

His scholarly contributions have focused upon cartographic aesthetics and topographic mapping, particularly Soviet maps, which led to the publication of The Red Atlas in 2017 (University of Chicago Press). Co-authored with John Davies, the book provided the first general guide to Soviet military mapping - the world's most comprehensive cartographic project of the twentieth century.

The Red Atlas was published in 2017. Nature called the book a "glorious homage" and it featured as the Book of the Week in THE, where Jerry Brotton described it as "Brilliant... the best kind of cartographic history". Mark Monmonier praised the book as "carefully researched, well-written, and exquisitely designed and printed, it’s perhaps the only recent map history that can be called a real eye-opener". In 2019, a paperback version of The Red Atlas was published in Japanese by Nikkei National Geographic Inc. Kent gave interviews to several national Japanese newspapers in Tokyo in July that year while attending the 29th International Cartographic Conference.

From 2015 to 2017, he served as president of the British Cartographic Society and in 2020, became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a senior fellow of the (UK) Higher Education Academy. Kent has also held fellowships of the Royal Geographical Society since 2006 and of the British Cartographic Society since 2002.

Kent became head of the Cartographic Unit at the School of Geography, University of Southampton before his appointment as Senior Lecturer in Geography and GIS at Canterbury Christ Church University. Kent took up his role as Reader in Cartography and Geographic Information Science in 2015 and his projects have since involved the digital reconstruction of Anglo-Saxon Folkestone for a Heritage Lottery funded project to discover the life of St Eanswythe, a local seventh-century saint, as well as advising on geospatial projects for the UK Commission for UNESCO and on Soviet mapping at the Centre for the Changing Character of War at Pembroke College, Oxford.

On joining the Charles Close Society for the Study of Ordnance Survey Maps, Kent met John Davies, a retired systems analyst based in London who had published a paper in the Society's journal Sheetlines in 2005. Davies and Kent embarked on a period of joint research and collaboration with the aim of finding out more about Soviet mapping during the Cold War, which they went on to describe as 'the biggest cartographic story never told'. After publishing a series of academic papers, the Bodleian Library at Oxford invited them to submit a proposal for a short book as an introduction to the subject and eventually offered the project to the University of Chicago Press.

Kent became a Fellow of the British Cartographic Society in 2002 and of the Royal Geographical Society in 2006. In 2011, he was appointed deputy national representative for the UK to the International Cartographic Association (ICA) General Assembly and was vice chair of the Commission on Map Design for the Association from 2011–2015. He became the founding chair of the ICA Commission on Topographic Mapping in 2015, and in 2017, founded the World Cartographic Forum (a body within the ICA for leaders of national mapping societies to discuss common issues and share best practice).

Kent joined the British Cartographic Society in 2000 and the Society of Cartographers shortly after. He served as president of the British Cartographic Society from 2015 to 2017 and has been Editor of The Cartographic Journal since 2014. Kent has been a committee member of the Charles Close Society for the Study of Ordnance Survey Maps since 2008 and founded the Ian Mumford Award for excellence in original cartographic research by students for the British Cartographic Society in 2015.

Alexander James Kent FBCartS FRGS FRSA FSA SFHEA (born 24 August 1977) is a British cartographer, geographer and academic. He is Reader in Cartography and Geographical Information Science at Canterbury Christ Church University and a senior research associate of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford.