Teaching
I teach courses in political geography and contemporary Europe. Links to current syllabi can be accessed below and through the departmental site.
My lecture courses on Europe address many facets of the continent, from 18th century travelers through 20th century geopolitics to food labeling, boutique wines, and cultural tourism today. To those with a deeper interest in Europe or cultural history more generally, I recommend two sets of online lectures by leading historians. Both are excellent not only for learning about Europe – past and present – but also for gaining essential insights into key political concepts like nation, state, and community. I find these lectures absolutely riveting.
George Mosse lectures in European cultural history, available through the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
http://history.wisc.edu/mosse/george_mosse/audio_lectures.htm
Spiro Kostof lectures in architectural history, available through the Media Resources Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/kostof.html
I also recommend a radio program, titled ‘In Our Time’, by BBC 4. The program consists of a series of conversations, hosted by Melvyn Bragg, on a wide range of ideas from the antiquity to the present day. The program has an extensive archive that can be browsed alphabetically or by historical periods. Many of the conversations, especially those under the headings of ‘History’ and ‘Culture’, focus on Europe. The programs tend to place an undue emphasis on Britain, but they nonetheless manage to be really interesting—at least the few dozens that I have heard so far. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/
GEOG 391 - Modern Europe: Places and Borders
This course investigates places in Europe -- from the Urals to the Atlantic. The class starts out by exploring how the ideas of Europe and European culture came about in the first place and why they are so contentious. We will then turn to various aspects of European politics and culture, including European integration, nationalism and regionalism, citizenship and immigration, and the foreign relations of the European Union, to name just few. Throughout the class, we examine how social processes at various scales, such as local, regional, national, European, transatlantic, and global, are interconnected and interdependent. For example, we explore the ways in which the ever-growing interest in regional foods in Europe is linked to global trade relations, we analyze how the harmonization of visa regulations in Europe has affected travel and migration patterns there, and we contemplate the continent’s future role in world affairs. The format of the course is two lectures per week.
GEOG 453 - Political Geographic Analysis
This course focuses on the spatiality of politics: how a wide range of taken-for-granted assumptions about places underpin world politics and, conversely, how political processes shape these assumptions. The course first examines how the currently prevalent ideas about North and South, East and West, developed and developing places, came to be. It then explores the changing character of national borders and national identities, as well as the geopolitics of economic globalization, arms control, transnational pollution, regionalism, and humanitarian emergencies. In so doing, the course clarifies how distant places become interdependent and how this connectedness affects different parts of the world.
GEOG 493 - Contemporary Europe: Identity and Geopolitics
Course Schedule | Syllabus | Reader table of contents |
The objectives of this course are two-fold. First, it explores some of the key concepts and questions that animate political and cultural practices today: questions about community and difference, territories and borders, security and danger. Second, the course investigates economic, political, and cultural transformations in contemporary Europe and its immediate neighbourhood.
GEOG 533 - Political Geography
This course investigates how politics is bound with territorial definition; examines how the management of political issues is intertwined with the ways in which these issues are understood in geographical and territorial terms.