Current News and Events
Keep checking back for details of our upcoming Spring
"Friends of Geography Pizza Party"!!
Lee Schwartz, Director of the State Department's Office of the Geographer and Global Issues for the past five years, has been officially appointed as the Geographer of the United States, a position in which he has been serving in an acting capacity since July 2005. Schwartz is a 1976 graduate of Bucknell University.
Click here for a story on Lee from the November 2007 issue of the AAG Newsletter (p.4; www.aag.org). Lee was also recently featured in Junior Scholastic magazine. Click here for the interview.
The Geography Department welcomes Matthew Kelley who is joining us for the Spring 2008 semester as a visiting Professor. Matthew is teaching GEOG 204 and GEOG 209 for Duane Griffin & Paul Susman who will both be on sabbatical.
Matthew holds a doctorate in Geography from the Pennsylvania State University where he conducted research on the convergence of Internet-based technologies and the practice of community development. His research is based largely on participatory action projects conducted with formal and informal community groups in urban areas. Currently, he is involved in two ongoing research projects. First, in West Philadelphia he is working with a small community development organization to develop an Internet-based employment network for disadvantaged neighborhoods. Second, in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, he is collaborating with a documentary film maker and various formal and informal community groups to design a digital space for residents of the town to record their oral histories.
As a professor, Matthew has instructed courses that engage with issues in Applied Geographic Information Systems, Social Theory and G.I.S., Urban Theory, Cultural Geography, and Economic Geography. In all the courses that he teaches, Matthew seeks to integrate his own research experience with the material that he presents. His courses typically include an opportunity for students to apply the theories and skills learned in the classroom by conducting a public scholarship project with an outside organization or community group. For students who take his courses, he seeks, thereby, to provide a balance between theoretical concepts and real-world practical applications of those concepts.
Duane Griffin is on sabbatical this spring. From February 1-21, 2008 he joined Bucknell alumni and colleagues from Dartmouth, Columbia, UCLA, Georgetown, the University of Michigan, and Queens University on a trip to Antarctica. The group sailed on the M.S. Le Diamant from Ushuaia, Argentina across the Drake Passage and investigated sites on the Antarctic Peninsula, an area that is undergoing dramatic changes due to increasing temperatures. Before returning to the United States, Duane spent time hiking and kayaking in Tierra del Fuego.
Adrian Mulligan presented a paper at the Regional AAG Meeting in Reading, PA on November 16th & 17th, 2007 entitled: Countering Exclusion: the 'St. Pats for All' Parade. He will be presenting a paper at the national AAG meeting to be held in Boston in April 2008 entitled: "I breath, and lo! The chattel becomes a man": the diasporic transformation of Frederick Douglass in the Emerald Isle.
Also at the national AAG meeting, Adrian Mulligan and Duane Griffin will be presenting a paper together entitled: The Devil's Atlas: Dystopic Toponymy of the Continental United States. |
