The graduate program of the Department of Geography is one of the few in the country exclusively focused in human geography. In so concentrating our efforts, we have built an international reputation of excellence in several subfields of the discipline. Though the department is currently in the midst of an era of sustained growth in both the numbers of faculty and graduate students, we maintain a demonstrated commitment to a community of scholars, one in which faculty strive to help students realize their full intellectual potential.

Our pedagogical goals are intricately linked to promoting graduate student research. We aim to foster creative scholarship, to sustain intellectual rigor, and to facilitate spirited and constructive dialogue among contrasting viewpoints. Our community is defined by a strong focus on collaboration and cooperation, mutual support, and an aversion to factionalism.

The department has an extremely productive faculty with a wide range of research interests in human geography. The faculty are actively engaged in an array of multidisciplinary activities, and we have research experience in many countries.

In tandem with core seminars that ground students in the latest thinking in geographic methodology and theory, we encourage students to develop a program of study tailored to their individual needs. Regardless of a student's substantive foci, our program emphasizes the development of a strong theoretical foundation coupled with methodological expertise in appropriate areas. This theoretical and methodological training can be supplemented with technical assistance in computer cartography, geographic information systems, and remote sensing.

Graduate students at UK are encouraged to develop professional skills through undergraduate teaching, presentations at scholarly meetings, writing research grants, service to departmental and professional bodies, and the publication of research in books and journals. These activities are viewed as part of a total educational experience designed to nurture intellectual independence and promote original contributions to the discipline and society.

Faculty and graduate students work within and across several departmental research clusters. These represent loosely structured collections of substantive interests with which both students and faculty identify, and for which there exist regularly scheduled seminars and reading groups. The clusters, together with some representative topics currently under study, include:

Cultural Studies:Interpretation and analysis of the built environment; space and representation; the political economy of landscape production; regional imagery; media studies; popular culture; the social construction of community; historic preservation; sport, recreation, tourism and society.

Development Studies:Policies and practices of development; political economy perspectives on development; postcolonial theory; economic restructuring and transition economies; household survival strategies; the relations between migration, transportation, tourism, and economic development; environmental management and sustainable development. 

Political Geography:Electoral systems; state theory; post-Cold War democratization; the geography of revolutionary change; critical geopolitics; political economy of environmental movements; political economy of globalization discourses and practices.

Social Geography:Health care, disease, and society; the geography of AIDS; the geography of aging and the life course; poverty and social policy; race and gender; human behavior in space and time; population and migration studies; spatial structure of social networks.

Social Theory: Theories of human spatiality; Marxist, neo-marxist, and post-Marxist theory; regulation theory; postmodernism and poststructuralism; feminist theory; space, landscape, and identity; geographic thought and society; technology and social change.

Urban & Economic:The local state and urban change; urban social conflict; neighborhood change; transportation systems analysis and transportation of disadvantaged groups; urban historical geography; regional economic restructuring; global financial systems; urban morphology; space-time convergence; information and communications; geography of multinational corporations; impacts of foreign direct investment. 

These substantive clusters are supported by faculty research in a large number of regional settings. In addition to expertise throughout North America, faculty have considerable field experience in: Africa, especially South Africa; the Caribbean; Europe, and especially Eastern European countries; the Himalayas; India; Indonesia; Japan; Malaysia; the Pacific Islands; the Philippines; and Singapore. Faculty research expertise in the Appalachian region of the U.S. is enhanced by the affiliation of several faculty with the University's nationally recognized Appalachian Center.

The faculty also have diverse methodological interests. These include extensive research methods employing quantitative data (especially multivariate statistical analysis and multiregional demographic methods); intensive, primarily qualitative, research strategies (especially experiential research and ethnographic methods); textual methods (especially the interpretation and analysis of representations and discourse); and field methods (especially as they pertain to the built environment).

Students and faculty maintain close ties with a number of programs and research centers outside the department. In addition to the above mentioned Appalachian Center, ongoing interactions are maintained with the Committee on Social Theory; the Department of Behavioral Science of the Chandler Medical School; the Environmental Studies Program; the Japan Studies Committee; the Kentucky Transportation Center; the Latin American Studies Program; the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging; the Sociology Department's Work, Gender, and Inequality Program; and the Women's Studies Program. Research experience, assistantships, and fellowships are often available in these research related institutes and programs on campus. 

The Department is committed to maintaining a diverse student body, and typically a third of our students are from other countries. Students at UK play an active role in departmental decision-making, in key organizations on campus, and in professional organizations. They also operate several LISTSERVs, including those devoted to political, feminist, and socialist geography. Many graduate students publish collaborative work with faculty members. In addition, graduate students are encouraged to present papers at regional, national, and international conferences, for which financial support is often available.

department & programs • people • environs • resources