My Courses

This is my bread-and-butter class -- hundreds of students have come through this course over the years. We discuss issues like health inequalities, vulnerability to heat stress, the ecology of infectious diseases like malaria, and how pandemics start and spread across the world. This course will help you understand global health crises and how to address them! See one of our recent COVID pandemic-related class projects here. Image: Malaria Eradication campaign poster from India, 1960s.

In this course we explore the geophysical nature and social dimensions of disasters caused by floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires. We pay special attention to whether and how global climate change is leading to more extreme weather events. I often teach this as a first-year course (freshman seminar) where I emphasize developing writing and research skills.

This course offers geographical perspectives on one of the world's most vibrant regions, Latin America and the Caribbean. Extending from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, this world region stretches across diverse landscapes, from tropical rainforests to the snowcapped peaks of the Andes, from mega-cities to verdant plains and sparsely populated deserts. Lately I've been rotating the teaching of this course with my colleague, Xavier Haro-Carrión. Image -- I took this photo of a hummingbird with flower on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

In this class, we flex the spatial-analytical side of medical geography, using GIS and statistical software to analyze the spatial distribution of diseases and other health problems, and to generate hypotheses about the causes of those patterns. The only pre-requisite for Health GIS is our department's Intro to GIS course, but I also recommend Medical Geography, Epidemiology, and/or Statistics before taking it. Image: land cover map, from student project in Spring 2021 Health GIS.

Public health is an integral but often overlooked aspect of the historical development of Latin America and the Caribbean. While it is hard to generalize about such a diverse region, many countries (e.g., Cuba, Chile, and Costa Rica) have achieved "first-world" standards of public health despite relatively low levels of economic development. Health has also been a key issue in debates about the scope of national welfare states, and intersects with many other social and political issues, such as the role of women in society, race and ethnicity, and social inequality. See my students' great web resource, Public Health in Latin America: A Research Encyclopedia. Image: Chilean public health poster from early 1970s, during Allende presidency.

A research seminar in which students conduct individual inquiry into problems in medical geography. We cover historical paradigms in medical geographic thought; international health and development; disease ecology; emerging infectious diseases; the social determinants of health; place or neighborhood effects; environmental justice; spatial epidemiology; and critical approaches to health, the body, and power. Since this is a seminar course we will also emphasize developing your skills in scholarly research and writing, as well as learning how to evaluate and integrate insights from different disciplines. Image: Anarchist conception of the capitalist system, from International Workers of the World (I.W.W.--the Wobblies).