Coffee Hour with Randall F. Mason | AAG information | King’s book receives award

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

SYWIG day students mapping

Three schools and a total of 35 middle school girls participated in this years Supporting Young Women in Geography (SYWIG) Day, held in the Department of Geography on April 22. One activity, run by Carolyn Fish, Cary Anderson, and Emily Domanico focused on mapping the impacts of climate change. Here, girls are using contour lines on a topographic map to predict what coastal areas would be inundated in the future with 25 feet of sea level rise. Photo: Tara Mazurczyk.

GOOD NEWS

The Department of Geography launched a new website on March 20, 2018. The URL will be the same as before: www.geog.psu.edu, however any links to pages within the old site will no longer work. Check any links you currently have to our website, and contact geography@psu.edu if you are having trouble linking to the pages or content you seek.

  • A paper by Jamie Peeler and Erica Smithwick titled “Exploring invasibility with species distribution modeling: how does fire promote cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) invasion within lower montane forests?” has been accepted for publication in the journal, Diversity and Distributions.
  • Brian King’s book, States of Disease: Political Environments and Human Health, received the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award from the Political Geography Specialty Group of AAG.
  • Harrison Cole passed his PhD candidacy exam.
  • Aparna Parikh successfully defended her dissertation.
  • Megan Bauman passed her PhD proposal defense.
  • Julia Higson is giving a presentation at the 2018 Center for Global Studies, Penn State-Pittsburgh Undergraduate Research Symposium, April 6 at The Nittany Lion Inn.

COFFEE HOUR

Coffee Hour: Randall F. Mason “From geography to design”

My academic and professional path began in geography and (at mid-career) has settled in the design fields of urban planning and historic preservation. This talk draws on work from two different points in my career: research begun in the early 1990s on the urban history of NYC at the turn of the 20th century, very much inspired and informed by the mentorship of Deryck Holdsworth; and work (ongoing since 2014) on the conservation and interpretation of Rwandan genocide memorials. The links between these projects center on interpreting and practicing historic preservation and urban design as cultural and social practices. These, and my other scholarly and professional projects, continue to be informed by the basic insights about societies and built environments I learned first in cultural and historical geography.

  • 3:30 to 5:00 p.m.: Refreshments are offered in 319 Walker Building at 3:30 p.m.; the lecture begins in 112 Walker Building at 4:00 p.m.
  • Coffee Hour To Go Webcast

NEWS

Penn State Geographers at AAG

More than 70 Penn Staters, including students (graduate and undergraduate), faculty, and staff are participating in the AAG annual meeting in New Orleans, April 9–14.
Among the highlights:

AAG Obituary for Peirce F. Lewis

Peirce F. Lewis, an American geographer and professor emeritus at the Department of Geography at Penn State, died on February 18, 2018 in State College, PA. He was 90.

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Peirce worked as a civilian geographer in the U.S. Army Forces Far East Command in Tokyo, Japan from 1953-1955. Afterward, he conducted post-doctoral study focusing on geomorphology of North America. Peirce joined the Geography Department at Penn State in 1958 where he taught until his retirement in 1995.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

Procrustes target analysis: A multivariate tool for identification of climate fluctuations

Michael B. Richman and William E. Easterling
Journal of Geophysical Research
doi:10.1029/JD093iD09p10989
Agriculturally important climate fluctuation types are identified by using an expert systems approach to synthesize information concerning the sensitivity of various aspects of Midwestern corn production to climatic variability. This information forms target criteria which are the basis for subsequent multivariate analysis using a technique new to meteorology, Procrustes Target Analysis (PTA), to fit the target to climatological data. Mathematical derivation of PTA is presented, along with an example of its application. The results of the analysis indicate that significant climate anomalies exist in the Midwest which agree with the target coefficients. Their spatial evolution is presented. Further investigation reveals that coherent areas of these fluctuations persist for large periods of the 15‐year windows examined and that they appear to impact corn production.

Architectures of hurry: An introductory essay

Deryck W. Holdsworth, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Richard Dennis
Architectures of Hurry—Mobilities, Cities and Modernity
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351746601
‘Hurry’ is an intrinsic component of modernity. This introductory essay situates ideas about hurry in recent literatures on modernity, mobility, speed, rhythm and time–space compression, but argues for a distinctive focus on the infrastructures, practices and emotions associated with ‘hurry’. To this end, the essay explores literary representations of hurry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including E.M. Forster’s notion of an ‘architecture of hurry’ on the streets of modern London and Matthew Arnold’s ‘sick hurry’ of modern life, and reviews a lexicon of words often associated with hurried mobility. As an experience, if not as a word, ‘hurry’ predates modernity, yet the very contradictory and ambiguous character of hurry reflects the contradictions and ironies at the heart of urban modernity. The introduction concludes by summarizing the themes of subsequent chapters and acknowledging some inevitable omissions in the range of empirical studies, which also imply scope for future research structured around ideas of modern hurry.

Wood Pulp and the Emergence of a New Industrial Landscape in Maine, 1880 to 1930

John H. Clark (’10g) and Deryck W. Holdsworth
Maine History Volume 52

Maine History Journal


Between the 1880s and 1930s, investors developed over seventy pulp and paper mill sites to exploit the woods and inland waters of Maine. Authors John Clark and Deryck Holdsworth tracked the changing historical geographies of papermaking in Maine during this period through an analysis of data from Lockwood’s Directory, the industry’s leading monitor of investment. They also mapped mill sites, noting their changing capacity and shifts in product types as consumer needs evolved. Their work shows how the development of a railroad network helped facilitate a shift from smaller mills at coastal sites to larger mills at inland settings, which exploited water power from the state’s major rivers. This spatial shift, they argue, was also accompanied by an increasing portion of the ownership being controlled by out-of-state capital.

 

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