UD to have strong presence at national geographers’ meeting

3:20 p.m., March 11, 2004--The University of Delaware will have a strong presence at the centennial meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), to be held March 14-19 in Philadelphia.

Frederick E. Nelson, professor of geography, will deliver the Blackwell Geomorphology and Society Lecture and the AAG’s climate specialty group will present Cort Willmott, professor of geography, with a lifetime achievement award.

Willmott will join David Legates, associate professor of geography, for two sessions titled “John R. Mather and His Legacy” in honor of the late chairperson of the UD Department of Geography, and Peter Rees, associate professor of geography, will lead a walking tour of central Philadelphia.

Nelson will deliver the Blackwell Lecture, which is cosponsored by Blackwell Publishers and the AAG’s geomorphology specialty group, on Wednesday, March 17. The Blackwell Lecture showcases a contemporary research topic involving landform science and human occupation of the Earth. The title of Nelson’s lecture is “Cold Comfort: Impacts of Climate Warming in the Permafrost Regions.”

Working with Dorothy Sack of Ohio University, Nelson also has organized a series of seven historically oriented sessions for the conference under the title “Celebrating a Century of Physical Geography.” The sessions involve 60 participants from the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Nelson chairs the association’s Nystrom Awards Committee, which evaluates a series of dissertation-based papers by young geographers, and is also chairperson of the cryosphere specialty group.

Willmott will receive the lifetime achievement for his innovative and influential work on climate modeling, data analysis and spatial analysis. He was honored with a similar award from the association itself several years ago.

Willmott and Legates have organized two sessions to honor the contributions of late geographer and climatologist John Mather, who chaired the UD department for more than 20 years and founded its graduate programs.

Rees will lead a walking tour of central Philadelphia to examine the interplay of the historic Penn plan and Bacon’s downtown urban renewal plan for the city. Sites will include Rittenhouse Square, the Franklin Parkway, Reading Market, Independence Mall, Old City and South Street.

In addition, UD faculty and students have contributed 20 papers to the conference.

William Morris Davis, a world-renowned geographer who taught at Harvard University, founded the Association of American Geographers in 1904 in Philadelphia. Since then, the association has grown from a small and exclusive group of academics to a large and diverse group of individuals engaged in a wide range of geographical pursuits.

Members, who number about 8,500, participate in the association through 53 specialty groups organized around such topical interests as climate, culture, water resources, remote sensing, geomorphology, geographical education and various world regions.

For more about the centennial meeting, see the association’s web site [http://www.aag.org/].

Article by Neil Thomas

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