Announcements

AAG awards Ph.D. candidates Jimena Perez, Lee Crandall, and Andrea Lara-Garcia for their Outstanding Work

April 2, 2025

The American Association of Geographers (AAG) honors geographers who advance their discipline through their hard work and brilliant insight.

Congratulations to Ph.D. Candidate Jimena Perez for winning the AAG Latinx Geographies Speciality Group's 2025 LxG Graduate Student Paper Award for her paper "Restorying the L.A. River."

Ph.D. Candidate ...

New map co-created by UC Berkeley geography scholars reimagines the Bay Area from Indigenous perspectives

March 31, 2025

“Many maps respond to questions of time by freezing it, presenting a cross-section or snapshot of a landscape, that then needs more maps to show change. This map addresses this issue by showing how spaces and landscapes hold time too, portraying both the past and present together, rather than freezing time in place.”

A recent interview with Clancy Wilmott highlights her collaboration with the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and studio-geo?...

Geography Alumnus, Tohar Zamir, Reports on Wildlife Resiliency After LA Fires

January 24, 2025

"When wildfires traveled down from the brush toward homes in the Palisades and Altadena, they left a wide scar not only in the built environment, but the natural landscape too. When will those areas look green again?"

KCRW reporter Tohar Zamir (Class of '24), chats with experts at Tree People to learn more about wildlife resiliency, restoration efforts, and landslide risk in his new article, "Wildlands that burned may find that nature heals itself."

Undergraduate Major Advisor Earns Outstanding Advisor Award

November 1, 2024

Congratulations to Ambrosia Shapiro, Undergraduate Major Advisor and Events/Communications Coordinator, who has been selected to receive UC Berkeley's Outstanding Advisor Award. The criteria for this award is an individual who has demonstrated a positive impact on student learning, engagement, belonging, and success; and embody a student-centered, equity-oriented, strengths-based approach to advising, counseling...

Peter Ekman (PhD '16) Publishes New Book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism

November 3, 2024

Peter Ekman, PhD alum and current faculty member at USC's School of Architecture, has published his first book. Timing the Future Metropolis is a hemispheric intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science. It reconstructs the midcentury intellectual network that gave rise to the interdisciplinary field of urban studies — at a time when geography departments were closing across the U...

Professor Nathan Sayre Publishes "Corn and the range: rethinking ranching, agriculture and the feedlot"

December 11, 2023

Professor Nathan Sayre has published a new paper in the Journal of Peasant Studies on the history and political ecology of the feedlot in US livestock production. The key takeaway is that for over a century, corn-fed beef was sustained without chemical fertilizers, relying on a closed nutrient loop rather than the metabolic rift that defines the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) of today. This history is completely missing from current...

Associate Professor Brandi Summers Named Interim Director of ISSI

December 15, 2023

ISSI Director Stephen Small will be on sabbatical during spring semester, researching his new book on Black Liverpool. Brandi T. Summers, Associate Professor of Geography, has agreed to serve as Interim Director until Professor Small’s return on July 1, 2024. Summers is currently a member of the ISSI Advisory Committee and has been deeply involved with ISSI for a few years, including serving as a respondent for ISSI Graduate Fellows.

Professor Emeritus Michael Watts Awarded Ester Boserup Prize

December 20, 2023

Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Michael Watts, who received the Ester Boserup Prize for outstanding development research! The prize is awarded by the Copenhagen Centre for Development Research, a virtual centre connecting researchers from different disciplines, especially from the University of Copenhagen.

The Ester Boserup Prize is awarded to a scholar whose research has improved and deepened our knowledge of development...

Geography Professor Emerita Gillian Hart Publishes Paper on Antipode Online

January 31, 2024

Professor Emerita Gillian Hart's latest paper, Progeny of Empire: Defining Moments of Nation Formation in South Africa and Palestine/Israel, aims to confront and counter the equation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism by recognizing the value of—but also reaching beyond—the apartheid analogy by situating both South Africa and Palestine/Israel in a global comparative and spatio-historical frame. Using Hart's South African Jewish roots, the paper focuses on how South Africa and Palestine/Israel have been forged as...

Lecturer Joel Wanek Wins Berkeley Collegium Grant Award

April 18, 2024
Congratulations to Lecturer Joel Wanek, who has been chosen as a recipient of a Berkeley Collegium Grant Award for his proposal, "Deep Listening: Sonically Mapping Bay Area Creeks!”