Dr Christof Pforr is Professor of Tourism in the School of Management & Marketing, Faculty of Business & Law, Curtin University. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University) and a ‘Staatsexamen’ in Geography and Political Science from one of Germany’s Elite Universities, the University of Tübingen (Germany). His academic background is reflected in his main research interests, which include tourism public policy and planning, sustainable (tourism) development, special interest tourism (e.g., wellness tourism, medical tourism, coastal tourism, food & wine tourism; indigenous tourism and geotourism) as well as destination governance with a specific focus on network management and network analysis, all fields he has frequently published in.

Prior to joining Curtin University in 2003, Professor Pforr held academic positions in Australia at the Northern Territory University, the University of Canberra and Edith Cowan University. Furthermore, he has been a Visiting Professor at a number of international universities such as the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University Ravensburg (Germany), the University of Tasmania (Australia), the Cologne Business School (Germany) and the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Germany), the University of Namibia (Namibia) and the Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences (Germany). He has also been a guest lecturer at the European Overseas Campus in Bali (Indonesia) and in 2018 a Visiting Professor at the Phuket College of International Tourism, Phuket Rajabhat University, Thailand. In 2022 and in 2014 he was an invited International Guest Professor at the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Germany), and in 2023 Visiting Professor at the National University of La Plata, Argentina, Universidad de la República Uruguay, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Santiago, Chile), the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil, and the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil. In 2025, he was an invited Visiting Professor at the National University of Malaysia (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) and appointed as International Guest Professor at University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna (Austria) in 2026.

Additionally, Professor Pforr has been regularly invited to give keynote addresses at numerous international and national conferences, workshops, and symposia, including in countries such as Germany, Austria, Italy, Indonesia, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Maldives, Argentina, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Australia.

Professor Pforr has contributed to more than 200 publications and numerous international research projects, in addition to national projects under the umbrella of the Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre and the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre. He is currently on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Travel Research; Journal of Business Research; Tourism Review (Associate Editor); Tourism Recreation Research; Journal of Ecotourism (Associate Editor); Annals of Tourism Research – Empirical Insights; International Journal of Safety and Security in Tourism and Hospitality; the Tourism and Hospitality International Journal; Journal of Sustainable Geoscience and Geotourism, the International Journal of Tourism Policy, Tourism and Hospitality, Frontiers in Sustainable Tourism, and Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft as well as the editorial board of Emerald’s Advances in Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research book series.  

In 2004, his doctoral research was recognised with the dissertation award of the German Association for Australian Studies, in 2005 he received the Curtin Business School New Researcher of the Year Award, in 2015 the School of Marketing Researcher of the Year Award and recently he received the 2017 Association Internationale D'Experts Scientifiques Du Tourisme (AIEST) Best Contribution Award. Professor Pforr has been involved in research projects that have attracted around 2.5 million AUD in external and internal funding. He is a Registered Supervisor (Level A).