Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Overview
For the past 75 years, UW-Madison has been home to one of the top
ranked geography departments in the nation.
The strength of our department is reflected in our ability to attract top-caliber students, compete for significant research funding, and publish foundational scholarly work. Although we are a small department by national standards, we are able to make significant and lasting contributions to key theoretical and methodological aspects of the discipline, in particular, with work that establishes new research areas or find new linkages across fields. Examples of such pioneering work from past decades include Yi-Fu Tuan's critical role in shaping the field of humanistic geography, William Denevan's leadership in shaping cultural ecology research and his status as a world authority on aboriginal populations, and Arthur Robinson who is one of the most important academic cartographers of the 20th century. Our faculty have been long been recognized both by the university and within our profession for their outstanding contributions (e.g., named chairs, lifetime achievement awards, Guggenheim fellowships). This commitment to excellence is reflected in the fact that our department has continuously been ranked among the top three programs in the country since rankings began in 1924.
Our Geography Program is organized into four major thematic areas: physical geography, people-environmental studies, cartography and GIS, and human geography, which are described in detail below.
There is intentional overlap among the thematic areas and many of our faculty work across subfields (e.g., teach courses in both human and people-environment). The department's strength lies in more than its faculty. We are fortunate to have the Robinson Map Library (with over 500,000 items) and the UW Geography Library housed within Science Hall. Combined, these libraries represent one of the largest and best collections of geographic materials anywhere. We are also proud of the accomplishments of our graduates, many of whom have gone on to prominence within government, industry, and academia. Some of the most influential names in geography received their training here in Madison. However, we are not content to rest on our laurels and the future looks equally bright. What follows is a description of our current research and teaching directions.
UW-Madison is a world-class research university that provides many opportunities for inter-disciplinary collaboration. The strength of our department is reflected in our ability to attract top-caliber students, compete for significant research funding, and win major awards, including more Guggenheim Fellowships than any other geography department. We are fortunate to have both the Robinson Map Library (with over 500,000 items) and the UW Geography Library housed within Science Hall. Combined, these libraries represent one of the largest and best collections of geographic materials.
People-Environment Geography
"People-Environment Geography" is a field of geography broadly concerned with the interconnections between people and the environment. This field is wide-ranging and includes scholarship on themes ranging from human impacts on natural systems, to environmental conflict and struggles over natural resources, to critical analyses of the meaning of 'nature' and 'degradation' and their links with forms of social power.
The UW-Madison department officially recognized People-Environment Geography as a field of specialization during the 1970s, but the department has a longer tradition of research in this area. Throughout the 1960s, UW Madison was an intellectual center for 'cultural ecology', a subdiscipline closely allied with anthropology that centers on detailed field research of indigenous resource management to understand how the environment shapes culture and vice versa. Biogeography has also been strong at UW Madison, particularly in light of Thomas Vale's investigation of human impacts on natural systems and alteration of disturbance regimes, such as fire.
View a Department of Geography poster on people-environment geography >
During the 1990s and continuing today, People-Environment geography
at UW-Madison has expanded its scope to consider environmental change
at broader levels. 
The emphasis on cultural ecology has broadened to incorporate 'political
ecology', a conceptual framework that emphasizes political explanations
for environmental problems using nested analytical scales, from
local to international. Political ecology also critically addresses
narratives of environmental change, representations of nature and
struggles over access to natural resources. Beyond political
ecology, people-environment geographers at UW-Madison are concerned
with ecosystem fragmentation, and the impact of human-induced changes
on ecosystem function.
People-environment geographers at the UW-Madison have extensive training in both social and natural sciences, particularly ecology. Thus they occupy a 'middle ground' between physical and human geography. People-environment geographers commonly rely on both qualitative and quantitative methods, including remote sensing and GIS. Two particularly strong realms of people-environment research at UW-Madison are environmental history, and the sociopolitical dimensions of environmental change and conservation in developing countries.
William Cronon works on the environmental history and historical geography of North America, with special focus on the American West and the frontier. He seeks to make past environmental change relevant to contemporary policy debates, and has a special interest in the writing and rhetoric of history and geography.
Leila M. Harris focuses on socio-political dimensions of developmental and environmental change. Particular research interests include social inequalities with respect to resource management and environmental changes, feminist political ecology, and water resources. Her work to date has focused on these themes in the context of Turkey, in addition to theoretical work on environment-society linkages, water conflict, development theory, and questions of gender, ethnicity, and state/nation.
Lisa Naughton focuses her research on the socio-political dimensions of biodiversity conservation in developing countries, particularly the humid tropics. She is especially interested in wildlife ecology in human-altered landscapes, and in land use and social conflicts around protected areas. In recent years, she has investigated patterns of conflict and coexistence for wolves and people in the Lake Superior region.
Matthew Turner Matt Turner's research falls at the intersection of the political ecology of agropastoral production (resource access and conflict, science studies, land-use analysis); tropical savanna/steppe biogeography (nutrient cycling, range ecology, environmental monitoring); and agrarian and development studies (gender, state-local relations, politics of scale). Regional specialization: Sudano-Sahelian West Africa.
Human Geography
"Human geography" is the field of the discipline of Geography that is principally concerned with the spatial organization and differentiation of human activity, and its interrelationships with the "environment", broadly defined.
Human geography has a long history at UW-Madison. The first human geography course ("Economic Geography") was offered on the Madison campus in 1896, in what was then known as the School of Economics, Political Science & History. Following the formal establishment of the Department of Geography in 1928, human geography at UW-Madison would emerge as a key intellectual force in the development of the discipline in the United States, and in the Global North more generally.
View a Department of Geography poster on human geography >
From the mid-1930s onward contributions in historical geography,
political geography, the history of geographical thought, area studies,
quantitative theoretical economic geography, humanistic geography,
and urban geography shaped the course of ideas in the 
discipline. Throughout this period a considerable breadth of interests
was evident in the department, as was an interest in building bridges
between human geography and physical geography. In this context
the human geographers collaborated to establish the People-Environment
stream in the department during the 1970s, forming a range of productive
alliances at the border-zones of what we now more popularly call
"nature and society" studies.
In the contemporary era, established interests in urban-historical geography (Ostergren), urban-economic geography (Cadwallader), geographic theory and philosophy of geography (Sack) have deepened and been augmented by new emphases in areas like political geography (Kaiser), social geography (Wong; Harris), urban-economic geography (Olds), and political-economic geography (Peck). Bridges between human geographers and people-environment geographers in the department are also evident, especially with respect to graduate student advising. "Area studies" expertise in Western Europe (Ostergren; Peck), Middle East (Harris), Africa (Wong), Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (Kaiser), Southeast Asia (Olds), and Canada (Olds; Wong) are also evident in the human geography faculty. We are currently attempting to chart out future directions, aware of the long history of human geography at UW-Madison, though cognizant that we are operating in qualitatively different local, national, and global contexts (in substantive and intellectual senses) at the start of the 21st century.
Martin Cadwallader is currently the Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Chancellor for Research. His teaching interests are in the areas of urban geography and quantitative methods. He has published three books on urban geography and migration, and his current research involves using structural equation models to explain interregional migration flows.
Robert Kaiser specializes in political geography, ethnic geography, population geography, and Eurasian area studies. He is also the director of the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is particularly interested in the geography of nationalism, and is currently researching the ethno-politics of scale and the rescaling of place and identity in the former Soviet Union.
Kris Olds is an urban-economic geographer and urban planner. His research primarily focuses on the geographical organization of power in relation to contemporary urban transformations. The geographic context for his research is the broad Asia-Pacific/Pacific Rim region, and the interdependent skein of global cities spread around the globe.
Robert Ostergren's work in historical and cultural geography focuses on processes of migration and settlement, and on the production, preservation and meaning of cultural landscapes and regional identities. He teaches intermediate and advanced courses that explore these topics largely in the European or North American context.
Jamie Peck is a political-economic geographer with teaching and research interests in urban and regional restructuring, labor studies, theories of economic regulation and governance, critical policy analysis, globalization/localization, social and employment policy, and qualitative research methods. He is committed to the idea that geographical perspectives on "the economy" and "the economic" should be intellectually distinctive and that they should resonate with real-world concerns and problems, an approach that is reflected in both his teaching and his research.
Leila M. Harris focuses on socio-political dimensions of developmental and environmental change. Particular research interests include social inequalities with respect to resource management and environmental changes, feminist political ecology, and water resources. Her work to date has focused on these themes in the context of Turkey, in addition to theoretical work on environment-society linkages, water conflict, development theory, and questions of gender, ethnicity, and state/nation.
Physical Geography
The common thread in physical geography at UW-Madison has been a focus on environmental change, broadly defined to include climatic change and its effects on earth systems, human impacts on the environment, and environmental change that affected prehistoric peoples. Teaching and research in the physical geography program considers environmental change over periods ranging from recent historic times to the Quaternary (the last 2 million years).
Research
on these aspects of environmental change at Wisconsin foreshadowed
their emergence as pre-eminent concerns of physical geography
today.
The best-known example is probably the work on fluvial response
to climatic change that was done by Jim Knox at Wisconsin in the
1970's and 1980's, which integrated the quantitative revolution
in geomorphology (and physical geography in general) with a growing
body of knowledge on past climatic change. This work is
still widely cited in studies of fluvial systems in regions as
diverse as the Great Plains, northern Europe, and southern Africa.
Work by Knox on the streams of the Wisconsin Driftless Area is
also a classic case of research on the geomorphic impacts of land
use change. Other geomorphology and soils research in the Geography
Department at UW-Madison has emphasized both paleoclimatic impacts
and the paleoenvironments in which ancient peoples lived.
Tom Vale's research in biogeography has focused on recent vegetation
change in the western U.S., and the impacts of fire and human
activity on vegetation. These issues are the subject of
much current research in biogeography, and are also central to
major public policy debates over land use and resource management
in the American West.
Physical geographers also played an important role in the emergence
of the University of Wisconsin as a center of paleoclimatic research.
View a Department of Geography poster on physical geography >
An emphasis on environmental change at both historical and Quaternary timescales will continue to characterize physical geography at UW-Madison, based on recent faculty hires. The physical geography program is also well-positioned relative to two recent trends in research on environmental change. One trend is toward greater emphasis on collaborative research groups investigating climate, the terrestrial biosphere, and surficial processes. Both Jack Williams and Joe Mason are actively involved in such collaborative research groups. The broad, integrative approach that has long been taken in teaching physical geography at Wisconsin is also excellent preparation for students entering this type of work. The other trend is toward increasingly sophisticated efforts to model the global or regional interactions of atmospheric, biological, and earth systems. Historically, physical geography at Wisconsin has emphasized field-based research, but Jack Williams' research integrates field data with earth system modeling, adding a new dimension to the physical geography program.
Jim Knox is a fluvial geomorphologist, whose major research interests include human influences on river systems and hydrologic response to climatic change at historical and Quaternary timescales. Much of his current research is focused on development of high-resolution post-glacial and historical chronologies of floods on the Upper Mississippi River. He also studies the response of fluvial systems to changes in runoff, erosion, sediment mobility and storage, and human modification of drainage systems.
Joe Mason's research interests are in wind-blown sediments and eolian landforms, soils, and hillslope geomorphology. He is particularly interested in the response of eolian systems to climatic change in the Great Plains, reconstruction of Quaternary climatic change based on loess deposition and dune activity, and the influence of dust deposition on soils. He also studies long-term landscape evolution, especially in the Great Plains, and the influence of climate on hillslope processes.
Jack Williams is interested in vegetation dynamics and the couplings of the terrestrial biosphere and other components of the earth system, at timescales from decades to millennia. Much of his recent work has focused on mapping vegetation history and land cover change in North America, developing benchmark datasets for refining and testing earth system models. He is also investigating the effect of Holocene land cover change in eastern North America on regional atmospheric dynamics and climate variability.
Jim Burt and A-Xing Zhu have teaching and research interests, described in the following section, that span the boundary between GIScience and physical geography.
Cartography and Geographic Information Science
Geographic Information Science (GIScience) addresses the fundamental issues surrounding the use of digital technology to help people work with geographic information. GIScience is a field devoted to the acquisition, management, analysis, visualization, and representation of geospatial data. It is relatively new discipline that incorporates geography, cartography, spatial analysis, and related fields such as geovisualization, geodesy, geocomputation, cognition, and computer science. As an academic discipline, GIScience is concerned with both theoretical and applied issues relating to the creation, analysis, and visualization of spatial-temporal information, and it is inherently interdisciplinary in both its methods and applications. Here at UW-Madison, we are committed to the integration of GIScience with substantive geographic questions, such as natural resource inventory in U.S. and slope stability studies in China (Burt and Zhu), coastal erosion on the Great Lakes (Harrower), and cultural and landscape change in Inner Mongolia, China (Jiang). We believe that many of geography's significant research challenges can be effectively addressed only though informed use of GIScience knowledge and technology.
For the past 40 years, UW-Madison has enjoyed a world-class reputation in cartography, and more recently, in GIScience. We are one of only a handful of departments offering both a BS and MS in GIScience, as well as a very successful one-year Certificate Program in GIS.
View a Department of Geography poster on cartography and geographic information science >
Our well-established program is being expanded as new courses are introduced, including advanced classes in geocomputation and Web-based cartography. Most of our graduate students develop "dual proficiencies", that is, on one hand, they develop a high proficiency in technical fields (such as geographic information sciences, statistics, and computer science) which allows them to conduct comprehensive spatial analysis using modern information technology; on the other hand, they develop a strong background in disciplines related to the natural resource field (such as forestry, soils, water resources, and ecology) which allows them to apply the spatial analytical techniques effectively. Rapid technological change makes teaching GIScience a daunting prospect. We strive to help students develop both the applied skills necessary for today's digital world and a theoretical understanding of issues in GIScience so they can cope with future developments. While software may change, the fundamentals do not.
Jim Burt is interested in digital terrain analysis, visualization, and numerical modeling. He is particularly interested in methods for encoding process-driven landscape analysis. He teaches introductory and advanced courses in physical geography, statistical methods, and geocomputation.
Mark Harrower is interested in map animation, Web-based cartography, design theory, geographic visualization, and how interactive maps can help people "think visually." A central goal of his work is to help domain experts transform raw geospatial data into useful geographic knowledge through interactive mapping systems. He teaches introductory and advanced courses in cartography and visualization.
A-Xing Zhu is interested in the development of modern spatial information processing techniques (such as GIS/remote sensing, artificial intelligence techniques, and fuzzy logic concepts), and the application of these techniques in natural resource management and environmental modeling. He currently teaches courses in GIS and physical geography. His teaching focus has been on the integration of modern spatial information processing technology and natural resource disciplines.
Amy Burnicki's research focuses on land-cover-change analyses and the use of models for land-use/cover change and ecosystem dynamics.