September 2024: please note that I am on phased retirement (half time appointment) until May 15, 2026. I am not actively seeking or taking on PhD students. I will continue to serve on Graduate Committees and to work with MA and PhD students on aspects of their work. 

I am a historical cultural geographer. I explore US cultural landscapes, most often (but not always) in urban situations, and focused especially upon questions of race, racialization, and racism. My teaching and writing about cultural landscapes is catholic and takes several approaches which can be seen as fitting generally into one (or more) of the following formulations, which interrogate:

Landscape History: empirically documenting when/where was the landscape created, by whom, why, how has it been altered, and so on;

What the Landscape Means to identity (individual and collective, of people who live in and through the landscape) and interpretively;

The Landscape as Facilitator/Mediator of particular social, economic, political, and cultural intention and debate; 

Landscapes as Materialized Discourse/Discourse Materialized: asking questions about how does the landscape “work” to normalize or naturalize social and cultural practice, to challenge social and cultural practice, to provide a moment of intervention into social and cultural practice.

I also am interested in North American Settlement Geographies, particularly questions of land and property, and methodology in historical geography, especially (but not exclusively) as linked to questions of the archive and archival practice.