Colin G. Pooley (born 1950) is a specialist in transport and migration studies who is professor emeritus of social and historical geography at the University of Lancaster where he worked from 1975 until 2012.
He attended the University of Liverpool, graduating with an honours degree in Geography in 1972 (Rural economy and agricultural change in the upper Itchen Valley, 1500-1800) and PhD in Geography in 1979 (Migration, mobility and residential areas in nineteenth-century Liverpool).
He began teaching at Lancaster University in 1975, remaining until retirement and occupying several administrative roles including head of the former Department of Geography.
Pooley works on the social and historical geography of Britain and continental Europe since the eighteenth century.
He began his career investigating housing, health, crime, ethnicity and social change, notably in Liverpool.