This one’s been in the works for a while… Matthew Rosenblum and my article on the closure of the geography department at the University of Michigan is now in print! We draw on institutional archives at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library and interviews with department faculty to examine the storied institutional precarity of our discipline through a case study of one of its major twentieth-century departments. In the article, we aimed to take seriously context, contingency, and content—what were the historical-material conditions (conditioned by chance and accident) and what did geography have to say for itself?
Eric Robsky Huntley and Matthew Rosenblum. 2021. “The Omega Affair: Discontinuing the University of Michigan Department of Geography (1975–1982).” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (2): 364-384. DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1760780
If you would like a copy but don’t have institutional access to the Annals, let me know.
- Eric Robsky Huntley
ehuntley@mit.edu- They/them/theirs.*
Eric Robsky Huntley is a Lecturer in Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT where they maintain affiliations with the Data + Feminism Lab and the Healthy Neighborhoods Study. They also serve as a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School …