The world is a book. Those who never travel read only one page of it. — St. Augustine

A full professor of Geography at Bemidji State University (Ph.D. University of Iowa 1997), I’ve also taught at the Des Moines Area Community College, Grinnell College, Iowa State University, and Northwest Missouri State University as well as contributing regularly to the Summer Symposium on Community, Work, and Community Support at the Inter-University Center in Dubrovnik, Croatia.  Since 2012, I have frequently taught summer graduate courses in social development and also urban and regional planning at the University of Applied Sciences in Erfurt, Germany.

My fieldwork examines cultural and political ecology, ethnographic issues of leadership capacity, indigenous environmental knowledge, the environmental consequences of changing relationships between rural women’s health and work patterns, and land tenure issues in ecologically at-risk regions facing increased immigration and export cash cropping.  My teaching emphasizes land use and regional planning, and political geography, with growing interests in urban biodiversity, emergent urbanism, “participatory GIS”, and new spatial semiotics.