Julie A. Graham

Julie Graham, 64, a professor and specialist in economic and regional geography in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, died April 4 in Nashville from complications deriving from cancer as she was returning from a three-month research sabbatical in Australia. Born in 1945, Graham graduated with a B.A. in English from Smith College in 1968, and completed her PhD degree at Clark University in 1984. Her specialties included rethinking economy and economic dynamics; diverse economies and community economies; alternative economic development practice in the U.S., Australia and the Asia Pacific region; and economic subjectivity and politics. Early in her career, Graham was steeped in structural critiques of capitalist exploitation, but over time she came to feel that this critique could be disempowering. Graham’s scholarship overlapped with that of Australian colleague Katherine Gibson, so much so that they began to publish under the pen name J.K. Gibson- Graham. Together they developed what they came to call a “post-capitalist politics.” J.K. Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy was named a “Classic in Human Geography” by the journal Progress in Human Geography. Graham became an Associate Professor in 1991, a Full Professor in 1998, and served as Associate Department Head for Geography at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst between 1999 and 2006. With broad interests informed by her economic perspective, she served on many committees for students in Economics, Women’s Studies, Labor Studies, Education, Political Science, and Anthropology. Graham worked closely for many years with professors Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff in the UMass Economics department and published with them two volumes of edited essays in Marxist theory.

Julie A. Graham (Necrology). 2010. AAG Newsletter 45(10): 22.