Dorina-Maria Buda

Dorina-Maria Buda is Head of the Marketing and Consumer Studies (MACS) Research Group, and Professor of Marketing & Tourism Studies at Nottingham Business School. Professor Buda co-ordinates the research environment at the Division of Marketing and works with over 40 academics in the MACS research group.

Professor Buda is the winner of a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in collaboration with the European Commission from 2013-2017 in value of €500,000. In 2015, Professor Buda was also awarded a VENI grant as part of the Innovation Research Incentives Scheme of the Dutch Research Council in value of €250,000.

In her research monograph Affective Tourism: Dark Routes in Conflict, as well as in her wider work published in top peer reviewed journals, Professor Buda examines dynamics of performance and consumption of tourist places in areas of ongoing socio-political turmoil and conflict such as North Korea, Iran, Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian West Bank, as well as in eastern Europe. In-depth understandings of the role of emotions in such places can contribute to conflict negotiation and peace building.

Career overview
During her career, Professor Buda has worked at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand, Saxion Business School, and University of Groningen in the Netherlands, as well as at Leeds Beckett University where she was Professor of Tourism Management and Head of the International Centre for Research in Events, Tourism & Hospitality (ICRETH).

For sharing best practices and innovation in higher education, in 2015 Dorina was awarded a Teaching Excellence Fellowship (TEF) by the Board of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. This was connected to the innovative module at the Honours College of the University of Groningen: Passions of Tourism. The module included one week of fieldwork in Jordan and students were commissioned to design travel videos and brochures as part of their assessment.

Dorina has taught varying courses: Qualitative Research, Introduction to Research, Social Construction of Tourism and Tourists, Tourism Management, Passions of Tourism, amongst others.

Research areas
Professor Buda conducts interdisciplinary research at the confluence of cultural geography, consumer research and tourism studies. Her particular focus lies on:

· interconnections between consumption & emotions in times-places of socio-political conflicts;
· communist and dark heritage;
· creative and disruptive qualitative research methodologies.

Professor Buda has supervised Masters and Post/Doctoral candidates on topics related to leisure-led regional development; ‘nuclear tourism’ in Fukushima, Japan; complexities of non-rational decision-making in hospitality; tourism in the ‘death zone’; affective encounters at dark sites in Hiroshima, Japan, and ‘dark tourism’ motivation in camp Westerbork in the Netherlands, amongst others.