About the Department
About the Department of Geography and the Environment
For 55 years the Department of Geography and the Environment has provided multiple perspectives and tools to understand the relationships between people and their environments, analyze diverse cultural landscapes, and solve problems related to local and global change. The Department currently has 17 full-time faculty, 22 affiliated faculty, research fellows, and lecturers, almost 300 undergraduate majors, and 45 graduate students. From our beginning, we have supported regional and international studies, with special emphasis upon Texas and the Southwest, Latin America, the Mediterranean World and Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Northern and Eastern Europe.
The Department's faculty has had an outstanding record of research and publication; indeed, a recent survey in The Professional Geographer found the faculty's book publication productivity to be the highest of any geography department in the nation. Professor Karl Butzer is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. The faculty has made contributions to fundamental research through scholarship and policy work. We have received more graduate school dissertation awards in the last 15 years than any other department in our College, and Bill Doolittle has won the Graduate School's outstanding graduate advisor award (2004).
The department offers the best undergraduate geography program in Texas according to Rugg's Recommendations on the Colleges (2004), and we are number one in the nation in attracting high school students who pass the College Board Advanced Placement Test in Geography ( AAG Newsleter, January 2005). The department is ranked among the top graduate programs and we are tied for first place as having the best cultural geography program in North America ( The Professional Geographer 2003). The Department has graduated over 700 successful people who have pursued careers in law, business, medicine, government, education, the military, and journalism. Our 75 doctoral alumni and 220 master's alumni include a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a former president of the Association of American Geographers.