Overdue for an update . . .

Oh my goodness, it has been more than a year since posting to the blog.  That is not good.  It is as if nothing of consequence to UW-Eau Claire Geography has occurred since October 2014.  That is hardly the case.  

In October 2015, the department hosted another regional conference of the West Lakes Division Association of American Geographers (WLAAG).  See geography major Andee Erickson's nice article reporting on this event. Last April, we also co-hosted a mini-conference on the “geospatial confluence” of GIS, remote sensing, and photogrammetric professionals with the Western Great Lakes Region of the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (easier to say WGL-ASPRS) on campus. Also in the spring, we hosted a colleague from our sister geography department at the University of Aberdeen as well as a geographer from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, with whom we are also building a relationship.

This past year, two graduates of our department, who are now in PhD programs, returned to give featured talks. Jenna Christian, in the Geography program at Penn State, gave a campus-wide talk on "Feminist political geography and the intimately global dimensions of war and peace" in May 2015. She was also the invited speaker at our spring awards banquet as part of the same visit to Eau Claire. To learn more through Jenna's experiences, see her thoughtful posting of a few years ago on the UW-Eau Claire Geography Alumni blog and about what she is currently doing as part of her PhD fieldwork on her Everyday Geopolitics Houston blog.
Meghan Kelly at AAG Tampa Bay, 2014
Meghan Kelly, who graduated in 2012, received her masters degree at the University of Kansas and recently started in the PhD geography program at UW-Madison, with specific interests in cartography and geopolitics. She was our featured speaker for Geography Week this past November.  Her talk was on "From Shapefiles to Narratives: Mapping Syria's borders and border stories."  Meghan shared on the UW-Eau Claire Geography Internship blog a couple of years ago. And be sure to visit her web portfolio. We look forward to learning with Meghan as she progresses through her program at Madison.  

 There are also changes taking place in department personnel and programming. We now have 130 geography majors, a three decades high! Dr. Ryan Weichelt was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor this year, Dr. Bob Barth (Anthropology) is winding down his decades-long career in preparation for retirement, . New courses have been added to the course curriculum, the Geospatial Analysis and Technology comprehensive major will be offered starting in fall 2016, and the international comprehensive major is being rejuvenated as a transnational major.  

I will try to catch up on these and many other developments and things of interest to our community, but for now we are at the end of the semester and are preparing for final exams and grading.  More soon.

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