300
Undergraduate majors
EDUCATION
Teaching and learning in the Department of Geography combines advanced analysis and communication skills with research on urgent social and environmental problems. Students learn powerful concepts, modes of analysis, and quantitative, qualitative, and data visualization methods that prepare them to intervene in the spatial processes shaping our world. Students extend their learning through experiences such as service learning, participatory action research, creative digital scholarship, and internships. Our annual undergraduate symposium shares individual, team, and community engaged research with audiences from campus and beyond, and our undergraduate journal, Plenum, publishes students’ outstanding research.
Our graduate students win prestigious grants and awards for their research and writing. Many go on to faculty positions at universities around the world. Other M.A. and Ph.D. graduates do research and policy work for local, national, and international agencies, or work as attorneys, teachers, small business owners, activists, founders of nongovernmental organizations, planners, software engineers, and artists.
Students
Autumn 2024
- 300 Undergraduate majors
- 4 Master of Arts students
- 23 PhD students
Degrees Awarded
July 2023 - June 2024
- 145 Bachelor of Arts degrees
- 1 Master of Arts degree
- 3 PhD degrees
Major Student Awards
Since 2015
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships
- National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Grants
- Ronald E. McNair Fellowships
- Ford Foundation Fellowships
- Fulbright-Hayes Awards
- Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship
- Chester Fritz Foundation Fellowships
- Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships
- American Association of University Women Fellowship
- Mary Gates Undergraduate Research Awards
- Society of Woman Geographers Fellowship
- AAUW International Fellowship
RESEARCH
Geographers are interested in the reciprocal interactions and relationships between people, place, and environments. Our faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates study spatial dimensions of economic, cultural, social, political, and ecological processes. Our research themes, methods, and conceptual frameworks cross disciplinary boundaries and we have long-lasting connections to other units on campus, including the Jackson School of International Studies; the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology; the Simpson Center for the Humanities; the Department of American Ethnic Studies; the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies; and the Department of Law, Societies & Justice.
Faculty scholarship covers a wide range of inquiry. Recent research projects examine processes of urbanization and migration in China; social and spatial politics of care work; creative poverty politics of homelessness activism; public health geographies and the spatial regulation of gay people’s bodies and spaces; environmental, infrastructural and climate justice; humanistic GIS, carceral and labor geographies of food and agriculture; spatial patterns of residential segregation and racial diversity in U.S. cities; and spatial patterns in opioid prescriptions and mortality in Washington.
Areas of Research
- Critical Theory
- Feminist Theory
- GIS & Remote Sensing Geovisualization
- Health
- Indigeneity
- Labor Geographies
- Migration, Immigration & Citizenship
- Impoverishment
- Political Ecology
- Queer Geographies
- Race & Ethnicity
- Racial capitalism
- Social Movements & Inequality
- Spatial Data Science
- Urban Geographies