Anthony Howell joins ‘Annals of the American Association of Geographers’ as newest editor

Anthony Howell is the new Geographic Methods editor for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. He is an associate professor, director of the Center on Technology, Data, and Society (CTDS), and senior sustainability scientist at Arizona State University.  Howell brings to the editorship at Annals a background in computational, geospatial and quantitative social science methods. He currently serves as an associate editor for two journals (Progress in Economic Geography and Urban Governance) as well as having served as a guest co-editor for Economic Modeling. He works across several subspecialties in geography, including economic geography, industrial geography, development geography, and population geography, as well as the broader social sciences.

Howell’s work engages with interdisciplinary scholarship, extensive international research, and quantitative, geospatial and computational social science methods. His goals for his editorship include “helping to attract, guide and strengthen the quality of cutting-edge and cross-disciplinary research, hoping to raise the profile of the journal both within and beyond the AAG community.” His approach to attracting and working with authors will draw on lessons he has learned in his own scholarly experiences–such as helping to pioneer ethnic disparities research within China relying on mixed-methods survey data collection, advanced quantitative methods, and computational social science approaches—and co-publishing with a wide variety of colleagues in geography, planning, politics, economics, and strategy. His networks have grown to be international ones, particularly focused on China and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

Dr. Howell’s term begins in January 2026.

We thank longtime, outgoing editor Dr. Ling Bian, an AAG Fellow and professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Bian has been the Geographic Methods editor of the Annals since 2018, and also serves or has served on the editorial boards of numerous geography and GIScience journals, as well as on review panels for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Her current research interests include conceptual and analytical frameworks for the representation of dynamic geographic phenomena, individual-based and spatially explicit modeling of health behaviors, and spatial networks. During her tenure as an Annals editor, Dr. Bian has dedicated her efforts to advancing the geography discipline by promoting intellectually in-depth and socially relevant research outcomes.