Welcome to the newly renamed Department of Geography, Environment, and Planning. This website is currently being reconstructed but should provide you with good information about our evolving degree programs in Geography, Environmental Science and Policy (ESP), and Urban and Regional Planning (URP). It also provides much information about our faculty and their research and teaching interests.

What you will find is a Department that focuses on both theoretical and applied research with a global focus. Many of the faculty also participate in engaged scholarship with communities both at the local and global levels. More specific information about this, as well as information about degree and certificate requirements, can be found by following links to our undergraduate or graduate academic programs and then to the two main divisions of the Department: Geography and ESP-URP.

The new name of the Department reflects better the diversity of teaching and research interests of the faculty. It also, in my opinion, helps brand what we do as a science for those, particularly American, students who have very little knowledge of the “holistic” nature of Geography as, indeed, an Environmental Science, as I put it long ago (Holistic Guide to Geography). It also clearly signals the discipline’s traditional role as a comprehensive preparatory major for further degree work in the policy sciences and, of course, Urban and Regional Planning.

I am thus proud to be the Chair of this growing Department of energetic scholars at the cutting edge of transdisciplinary teaching and research. As you can tell from this reconstructing webpage, we are still in the process of the most recent reinvention of the Department as a result of evolving faculty interests. We are particularly proud of our recently established Ph.D. Degree program in Geography and Environmental Science & Policy. Our even newer Masters Degree program in Urban and Regional Planning promises to be just as successful.

Indeed, from my perspective as a traditionally trained geographer, I can easily see how our curriculum fits the current faculty’s respective research interests quite well. My own recent research on culture and globalization (e.g., here and here) and on the social production of nature (e.g., here and here), for example, would “fit” in either of the two internal divisions of the Department. I am sure that this is true for every member of the faculty which is why the Department remains, in my opinion, quite unitary in academic vision and mission even though it now has a composite name.

Please click here for my complete CV.