Department of Geography and Environment (GRAD)
The graduate program of the Department of Geography and Environment aims to produce leading scholars and practitioners who will make vital contributions to contemporary geographical, social, and environmental knowledge, research, teaching, and institutions. The department approaches this goal by creating an environment in which exceptional Ph.D. and M.A. students can draw on the strengths of faculty and research centers to develop and sharpen their own research interests, capabilities, and programs around critical geographical problems. The graduate curriculum is designed to promote a broad sense of the geographical tradition in its evolving relationship with other sciences, social sciences, and humanities disciplines, and to provide a disciplinary and interdisciplinary platform for more specialized scientific and scholarly investigation.
The program offers opportunities for graduate students with diverse backgrounds and goals to receive training in varied and integrated aspects of the discipline and to work directly with faculty members on specific research projects. Master's and doctoral degrees are offered, but the programmatic focus is on the doctoral degree. As much as possible, all programs are tailored to the needs and interests of the individual student. The student's academic advisor and committee members have prime responsibility for developing, with the student, an appropriate course sequence and research program and for providing mentoring of the student. The program aims to foster maximum flexibility for individuals while ensuring a uniformly high standard of geographical training for all graduate students. Graduate students work closely with research centers and programs related to their interests, including the Carolina Population Center, the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, the Institute for the Study of the Americas (UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University), the Center for the Study of the American South, the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, the Southeast Regional Climate Center, the Sheps Center for Health Services Research, the Ecology, Environment, and Energy Program, the Center for Urban and Regional Studies, the Institute for the Environment, and UNC–Chapel Hill's schools of public health and medicine. Up-to-date lists of geography faculty members and courses, along with additional information about the graduate program, faculty research projects, and other information, are available on the department's website. Students build strong research, teaching, and professional skills with emphases on data analysis, project design and management, and oral and written communication that prepare them for careers at universities and in the public and private sectors.
A large proportion of graduate students receive financial assistance. Sources of aid include teaching assistantships and work on sponsored research projects within the department, University-wide competitive assistantships, nonservice fellowships, merit scholarships, and externally awarded fellowships.
The department occupies the top two floors of Carolina Hall and has access to extensive computational laboratories needed to fulfill its research and teaching mission, with specialized facilities dedicated to spatial analysis and the use of geographic information systems. A range of geographic data sets is readily available. An extensive collection of geographic books and periodicals, including an exceptionally strong collection of foreign periodicals, is held in the nearby Davis Library, while Wilson Library houses a large map collection.
Courses
Numbered 400-999:
The Department of Geography and Environment offers advanced programs leading to the master of arts and doctor of philosophy degrees. While both the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees are offered, the major emphasis of the program is on the Ph.D., even for those not yet possessing an M.A. Incoming students are roughly evenly mixed between those with and without a master's degree.
All graduate students are required to complete three core courses (GEOG 702, GEOG 703, and GEOG 704) presenting the foundations of geographical theory, communication, and research. Thereafter, the program of study is flexible and tailored to the needs of the individual student. Students select the appropriate coursework and dissertation topic in consultation with their advisor and dissertation/thesis committee.
The Department of Geography and Environment has faculty strength in five overlapping areas of concentration. These represent coherent foci and areas of active faculty research, not mutually exclusive categories. Indeed, many students and faculty members work on projects that span more than one area. So, while intensive training is offered in a number of diverse areas, the program is noted for its integrative and cross-cutting approaches. The department's diverse graduate students are pursuing a wide variety of research at UNC–Chapel Hill.
Departmental research specializations include
Biophysical Geography and Earth Systems Science. UNC–Chapel Hill geographers examine the biophysical environment as an integrated system, emphasizing the linkages and feedbacks between terrestrial and atmospheric form and function. The focus is on the interactions between the structure and composition of the earth's surface, its soils and vegetation, and the atmosphere with those processes that actively cycle energy and material through them.
Culture, Society, and Space. UNC–Chapel Hill geographers investigate the intersection of space, place, landscape, and region with social and cultural processes, including issues of identity and representation, spatio-temporalities of social belonging and exclusion, and the production and circulation of value and values. This work encompasses a diversity of methodological approaches, scales, and concerns, from urban dynamics and symbolic spaces to rural landscapes, agrarian and industrial change, and social geographies of race, class, gender, health, and religion.
Geographic Information and Analysis. UNC–Chapel Hill geographers apply geographic information sciences as an integrated set of spatial digital technologies to investigate biophysical and social phenomena. They use and develop tools, techniques, concepts, and data sets associated with geographic information systems, remote sensing, data visualization, global positioning systems, spatial analysis, and quantitative methods.
Globalization and International Development. UNC–Chapel Hill geographers study the consequences of processes of globalization (and the anti-globalization and global justice movements they stimulate); international development and its effects on the geographies of international and local capital, labor, technology, information, goods and services; postsocialism, political economy, political geography and geopolitics, and political ecology.
Nature-Society Studies and Human-Environment Interactions. Drawing on analytical and theoretical perspectives from ecology, socioecological systems, political ecology, science studies, and cultural studies, UNC–Chapel Hill geographers investigate the social contexts, drivers, and consequences of environmental change and struggles over land use and resources.
Following the faculty member's name is a section number that students should use when registering for independent studies, reading, research, and thesis and dissertation courses with that particular professor.
Professors
Shorna Allred (52), Environmental Justice, Conservation Social Science, Conservation and Land-Use Decision-Making, Global Sustainability, Community Resilience, Southeast Asia and U.S. South
Michael Emch (29), Medical Geography, Spatial Epidemiology, Health and Environment, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing
Banu Gökariksel (28), Urban, Cultural, and Feminist Geography; Social Theory; Globalization and Modernity; the Middle East and Southeast Asia
Clark Gray (35), Population, Environment and Development; Survey and Statistical Methods
Elizabeth Havice (36), Political Economy and Ecology, International Development, Commodity Studies, Environmental Politics, Trade Politics, Fisheries Systems
Scott L. Kirsch (23), Historical, Cultural, and Political Geography; Science and Technology Studies
Charles E. Konrad (16), Synoptic Climatology and Meteorology
Elizabeth Olson (41), Critical Health Geography, Care Ethics, Child and Youth Geography, Inequality
Diego Riveros-Iregui (42), Ecohydrology, Watershed Hydrology, Biogeochemistry, Land-Atmosphere Interactions, Tropical Hydrology, Climate and Land Use Cover Change
Chérie Rivers (47), Black Geographies, Decolonial Praxes, Indigeneity and Sustainable Farming, Black Atlantic World
Sara Smith (33), Political and Social Geography, Nationalism, Health, South Asia
Conghe Song (24), Remote Sensing of Environment, Forestry and Forest Ecosystem Services, Modelling, Dynamics of the Integrated-Social and Environmental Systems
Gabriela Valdivia (32), Political Ecology and Resource Geography, Extractive Economies, Indigenous Communities, Latin America
Erika Wise (34), Dendrochronology, Climatology, Water Resources
Associate Professors
Javier Arce-Nazario (43), Landscape History, GIS-Remote Sensing, Translational Geoscience, Critical Physical Geography, Water and Sustainability
Paul L. Delamater (44), Health and Medical Geography, Access to Healthcare Policy, Spatial Analysis, GIS
Christian Lentz (39), Development, State Formation, Nationalism, Nature-Society Relations, Agrarian Studies, Southeast Asia
Nina Martin (31), Urban, Economic, and Migration Geography; Globalization and Urban Change; Urban Planning and Policy; Civil Society
Aaron Moody (18), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Biogeography
Assistant Professors
Amanda Gay DelVecchia (49), Freshwater Ecology, Biogeochemistry, Watershed Science, Groundwater – Surface Water Exchange
Anthony Dest (54), Latin America, Capitalism, Ethnography, Racism, Social Movement Theory, State Formation
Maliheh Ghajargar (53), Human-Environment Interaction, Sustainability, and Human-AI Creative Interaction
Ruth Matamoreos-Mercado (51), Land, Critical Indigenous Geographies, Moskitia, and Central America
Danielle Purifoy (48), Black Geographies, Environmental Justice, Uneven Development, U.S. South
Paul Taillie (50), Wildlife Conservation, Vertebrate Community Ecology, Global Change, and Remote Sensing
Teaching-Track Faculty
Jun Liang, Teaching Associate Professor
Adrian Drummond-Cole, Teaching Assistant Professor
David Parr, Teaching Assistant Professor
Julia Cardwell, Teaching Assistant Professor
Research-Track Faculty
John Pickles, Research Professor
Stephan Walsh, Research Professor
Richar Bilsborrow, Research Professor
Christopher Fuhrmann, Research Associate Professor and Deputy Director, Southeastern Regional Climate Center
Qi Zhang, Research Assistant Professor
Chao Wang, Research Assistant Professor
Adjunct Faculty
Lawrence Band (University of Virginia) Watershed Hydrology, Ecology & Geomorphology, GIS, Remote Sensing
Angel Hsu (Department of Public Policy), Data Science, Environmental Justice, Urban Heat Island, Climate Change
Pamela Jagger (University of Michigan), Energy, Livelihoods, Poverty, Forest Economics and Policy, and Human-Environment Interactions
Carlos Mena (Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador), GIS, Latin America, Population and Environment, Remote Sensing, Dynamic Modeling
Dinesh Paudel (Appalachian State University), Sustainability, Community Forestry, Development, Disaster Recovery and Resilience
Tamlin Pavelsky (Department of Earth, Environment, and Marine Sciences), Hydrology, Remote Sensing, Climate Change
Diego Quiroga (Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador), Environmental Life and Sciences
Andres Vina (Michigan State University), Environmental Change, Biophysical Properties of Vegetation, Human-Environment Interactions
Colin West (Department of Anthropology), Human Ecology, Households, Global Change, West Africa, GIS, Remote Sensing, Agent-Based Modeling
Professors Emeriti
Stephen S. Birdsall
John W. Florin
Wilbert M. Gesler
Richard J. Kopec
Thomas M. Whitmore
Department of Geography
