Department of Geography

Elizabeth Havice uses the lens of governance to explore distributional outcomes in marine spaces, food systems, and global value chains. She is a co-founder of the Digital Oceans Governance Lab (with L. Campbell) that explores intersections of data technologies and oceans governance and co-editor (with M. Himley & G. Valdivia) of the Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography.

Dr. Smith is a feminist political geographer interested in the relationship between territory, bodies, and the everyday. In her research, she seeks to understand how politics and geopolitics are constituted or disrupted through intimate acts of love, friendship, and birth. She has worked on these questions in the Ladakh region of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State in relation to marriage and family planning. Her first book, Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold, will be published by Rutgers University Press in March 2020. She is now engaged in a new project on marginalized Himalayan youth with Dr. Mabel Gergan. The latest publication from this collaborative work is just out in cultural geographies, titled, “Politics, pleasure, and difference in the intimate city: Himalayan students remake the future.” They are excited to also be working on making a zine together with Rinchen Dolma at the Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation. She also works on questions of whiteness, racism, masculinity, and nationalism in the US and globally.

Dr. Wise is a climatologist, and she conducts research about past water & climate primarily through dendrochronology, or tree-ring science. Her research group (the Climate & Tree Ring Environmental Science research group) overlaps with the related fields of ecology and hydrology. Most of her work focuses on climate patterns in western North American, past hydroclimate extremes (droughts and floods), and the ocean–atmosphere systems (like El Niño) that drive climate variability over time.