I spend most of my time thinking about American (US) cultural landscapes. I view the cultural landscape as simultaneously a material “thing,” or set of “things” as well as a spatial and visual epistemology, a view that reflects my background and training in landscape study. I began academic life in the American cultural geographic tradition traceable to the landscape formulations of Carl Sauer, later found critical human geography, and ultimately have come to a post-structuralist position that begins with the premise that the landscape is not innocent. That particular genealogy of landscape study is nicely summarized in Denis Cosgrove’s entry “cultural landscape” in the Dictionary of Human Geography (4th edition).

            As a result of this scholarly odyssey, my teaching and writing about cultural landscapes is catholic and takes several approaches, which can be seen as fitting generally into one (or more) of the following formulations:

• Landscape History: empirically documenting when/where was the landscape created, by whom, why; how has it been altered, and so on;
• What the Landscape Means: to identity (individual and collective, of people who live in and through the landscape) and interpretively (the landscape as “unwitting autobiography” to quote Peirce Lewis);
• The Landscape as Facilitator/Mediator: of particular political, social, economic and cultural intention and debate;
• Landscapes as Materialized Discourse/Discourse Materialized:  asking questions about how does the landscape “work” (to quote Don Mitchell), to normalize/naturalize social and cultural practice, to reproduce it, to challenge it.

My conceptual, theoretical, and methodological understandings of cultural landscape study can be found in several published essays (see my curriculum vitae), including those in Society and Space (1993) and Annals, AAG (1996), and in book chapters The Normative Dimensions of Landscape (in Groth and Wilson 2003) and Cultural Landscapes (in Gomez and Jones, 2007). My approach to the topic in graduate seminars can be gleaned from a sample syllabus from seminar Geo 711.

Most recently, my attention to landscape study has hinged on ideas of race. I recently edited the book Landscape and Race in the United States (NY: Routledge 2006) and am working on a monograph titled Racialized Landscapes in which I argue (through both narrative and visual forms) for a way of seeing race and racism as mediated through the cultural landscape, comprised in a series of vignettes empirically focused on Lexington, Kentucky.

More broadly, I am a cultural geographer, and recently co-edited A Companion to Cultural Geography (2004) with Jim Duncan (Cambridge) and Nuala Johnson (Queen’s Belfast). I also have long-standing interests in historical geographies in at least three areas. The first concerns historical geographies of Euro-American settlement frontiers in the United States.  I worked in that area in the early to mid 1990s, and plan on returning to the topic, through a project tentatively titled Land in which I will trace the central importance of land and property rights to ideas of citizenship and democracy through a case study of central Kentucky, c. 1780-present. The second entails a critical perspective on methodology in historical geography, as seen in a recent essay in Archivaria (2006), titled “Digging in your own backyard.” The third attends to the historical geography of Geography, as a discipline, and can be seen in the syllabus for my seminar in geographic thought required of all graduate students at Kentucky: Geo 707.