For fifty years I was a faculty member in the Department of Geography at the Ohio State University. I retired in 2015, but remain active. The purpose of this website is to keep anyone interested apprised of my research and writing. I will post recent papers and information about recent or forthcoming books. From time to time, there will be blog posts.
I have a particular research interest in the politics of local and regional development. A book published in 2016, The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the American Exception, places this in a comparative perspective. Boomtown Columbus (2021), then builds on this interest. The history of the field has long been a concern, as in my 2014 book Making Human Geography. I also have long standing interests in method, and in South Africa.
Meanwhile the website title refers to my position regarding current research and publication in human geography. I have been critical in the past about the way in which the field has been afflicted by a series of ‘turns’: an excessively enthusiastic and hasty embrace of new approaches before the old have been satisfactorily assimilated and exploited. Rather the old seems to have become the ‘Other’ against whose faults and omissions the virtues of the new can be celebrated. On this website, through my various publications and other writing, I hope to convince readers that the unfashionable might have its virtues.
Unfashionable Geographies 