Glenn Sebastian

Glenn Sebastian, Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of South Alabama, who spent four decades inspiring students in geology and geography, passed away on March 11, 2016, aged 74.

Glenn Robert Sebastian was born on June 18, 1941, and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended St. Louis University to study geography, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1963 and a master’s degree in 1965.

After serving as a park ranger and naturalist on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia, he began his career as an educator. He briefly spent time as an instructor at Indiana State University before moving to the University of South Alabama in 1967. The university, based in Mobile, had only been founded in 1963 and Sebastian was the first geography faculty to be appointed.

He stayed at the University of South Alabama (USA) for the next four decades aside from a time at the University of Northern Colorado for his doctorate in geography. His dissertation, completed in 1977, was entitled “The frequency and selection process of crop combinations in pecan orchards of Mobile and Baldwin Counties, Alabama.”

At USA Sebastian served as Chair of the Department of Geology and Geography (later renamed Department of Earth Sciences when a meteorology program was added to geography and geology) from 1981 until his formal retirement in 2007. He continued to teach students as Professor Emeritus until 2014.

His teaching covered many aspects of physical geography but he was also committed educator, continually seeking to improve teaching and learning, and developing educational resources, as the following diverse examples attest. In the mid-1970s, during his time at the University of Northern Colorado, he worked with Byron Augustin and Don L. Hunter to develop an “Oil Shale Multimedia Kit” for their graduate program, which was endorsed by the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) as suitable for schools and colleges.

In the early 1980s Sebastian was involved in a cross-disciplinary project at USA for improving the technical competence of undergraduates in writing, and presented the geography-specific findings at a NCGE conference. The year after, he presented to the NCGE a set of exercises for using the weather maps in a national newspaper to teach intermediate grade students about weather.

In the late 1980s he was involved with reviewing the state syllabus in the “Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education” project, which was seeking to improve the consonance between preservice courses for geography teachers and the middle school geography curriculum. He was also influential in the creation of “The Excitement of Meteorology!,” a National Science Foundation-funded four-week summer program that brought atmospheric sciences to high school students in Mississippi in the 1990s. Meanwhile, in 2004 he presented a paper at The Geological Society of America’s annual meeting describing how a fieldtrip for geology students to a rock outcrop in Alabama is used to teach them skills of scientific reasoning.

Over four decades, Sebastian taught more than 13,000 students – including multiple generations of families – and was a legendary figure in the university’s academic history. He was particularly known for his field trips, most notably through southwestern United States but also overseas.

Closer to home, he used the on-campus nature trail regularly as an outdoor classroom, not just for teaching students but also taking civic and community groups on short field trips through the area. It is located in headwaters of Three Mile Creek, and over three miles of trails wind through 95 acres of native pine/oak woodlands. In 2012 the university named the trail in his honor, in tribute to his love of and enthusiasm for the outdoors.

In 1990 he received the Outstanding Professor Award from university’s National Alumni Association and was also named Outstanding Faculty Member by Alpha Lambda Delta Freshman Honor Society. In 2005-6 he received a Teaching Excellence Award and in 2006-7 an Outstanding Service Award. In 2013 he was selected by a Faculty Senate committee as one of 50 Outstanding Faculty Members in celebration of the university’s fiftieth anniversary.

Outside of academia, Sebastian was a member of Holy Family Catholic Church in Mobile for 44 years, and was also an active member and past president of a local mystic society. He was a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, serving as a faculty advisor to the USA chapter for many years. He was an avid fan of the South Alabama Jaguars, Alabama Crimson Tide and the St. Louis Cardinals. He also loved spending time with his family, especially his grandchildren, as well as working in his yard and caring for his plants, many of which he brought home from his numerous trips to national parks across the country. He traveled extensively with his family and students including trips to Europe, Hawaii, Australia, Mexico, the Caribbean and all over the continental United States.

Sebastian will be fondly remembered by his former students for his inspiration and encouragement as a teacher and mentor. His name will live on at the university, not only in the Glenn Sebastian Nature Trail, but also through the Glenn Sebastian Award, which is presented annually to an junior level geography major who has made significant contributions to geography, and the Dr. Glenn R. Sebastian Endowed Geography Scholarship, which provides financial assistance to deserving students majoring in geography who demonstrate high academic achievement.

Provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, Dr. David Johnson, said, “Glenn Sebastian left an enduring legacy at the University of South Alabama. Through his 40 years of teaching, he touched the lives of thousands of students who loved his enthusiasm and his passion for learning and living. Glenn was among the greatest teachers I have known and he was a dear friend.”

Sebastian is survived by his beloved wife of 48 years, Darlene, their four daughters, Leanne, Amanda, Megan, and Emily, and their families, which include 9 grandchildren.

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Doreen Massey

Doreen Massey, emeritus professor of geography at The Open University, and one of the major figures in twentieth-century geography, passed away suddenly on March 11, 2016, at the age of 72. She was one of the most influential thinkers on the left, and her work on space, place and power has been recognized all over the world.

Doreen Barbara Massey was born on January 3, 1944, in Manchester, England. She spent most of her childhood in the Wythenshawe area of the city, a vast council estate. In the post-war era, the new ‘welfare state’ in Britain aimed to deliver a more just society. As a result Massey, coming from a working class family, could benefit from access to decent schooling, free health care and subsidized housing. This context strongly shaped her views and life’s work, particularly her left-leaning politics, and her interests in social and spatial inequalities.

Massey studied for a bachelor’s degree in geography at Oxford University in the mid-1960s. She pursued some specialisms in economic geography, including studying location theory, but was particularly stimulated by the interdisciplinary setting of the Oxford college system, spending much of her time talking with physicists, anthropologists and people from other disciplines. Although she loved intellectual exchange and using her brain she didn’t think that becoming an academic in the Oxford environment would enable her to do that.

Her first major position after graduating was at the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES) in London. This research institute was established by the Labour government in 1968 and tasked with looking at the problems of cities and regions in Britain. There she found a stimulating diversity of people including sociologists, physicists, economists and geographers who were both intellectually productive and politicised. Among the studies that she undertook in this period were “An operational urban development model of Cheshire” (with Martyn Cordey-Hayes, 1970), and “The basic: service categorization in planning” (1971).

In 1971-72 Massey spent a year away from CES studying for a master’s degree in the Department of Regional Science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She chose to study mathematical economics because she was becoming increasingly critical of the models that she was using in her work, particularly the location theory that she was taught at Oxford, because of their basis in neo-classical economics. However, with her lack of training in neo-classical economics, she felt the need to ‘know the enemy.’

At Penn she met a group of French Marxists and became very involved in philosophical discussions about French structuralism. This started another train of her intellectual thinking: she began to see a way of reading Marx that she found politically acceptable. The first thing she did on her return to the UK was to write a paper entitled “Towards a critique of industrial location theory” which was published in 1973.

Back at CES, Massey continued working on economic geography issues, particularly regions and inner cities within the UK. She established a working partnership with Richard Meegan, among others, and their influential joint publications included The geography of industrial reorganisation: The spatial effects of the restructuring of the electrical engineering sector under the industrial reorganization corporation (1979), and The anatomy of job loss: The how, why, and where of employment decline (1982). From 1973 she also sat on a Labour Party subcommittee to engage in the policy debate about inner cities and regions, regional inequality and the North-South divide in Britain.

Through the 1970s CES had established itself as the centre for left-wing thinking within urban and regional analysis; when a Conservative government came to power in 1979 it was shut down. At the time Massey was still working on research funded by a grant so she transferred herself to the London School of Economics to complete the work; she also made the grant last longer by doing some teaching at University of California, Berkeley.

While she was in the United States, she saw an advertisement for a position at The Open University (OU) and applied. OU was established in the 1960s thanks to the vision and determination of Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. It was the world’s first successful distance teaching university, founded on the belief that communications technology could bring high quality degree-level learning to people who had not had the opportunity to attend traditional campus universities.

Massey felt that OU, rather than a traditional university, would enable to be the intellectual, teacher and researcher that she wanted to be. In fact, she stayed at OU for 27 years until retirement, despite offers of professorships from elsewhere, including Oxford University. She remained loyal to OU because of its openness and accessibility to all who wanted to learn. She believed in being excellent without being exclusive and elitist.

Massey’s work reached into different fields of geography – economic geography, Marxist geography, feminist geography, cultural geography – but all concerned understanding power relationships in all of their complexity, and challenging them.

Her early work at CES established the basis for her later academic work in economic geography, particularly the ‘spatial divisions of labor’ theory that the unevenness of the capitalist economy created divisions between rich and poor regions and thus between social classes, causing social inequalities. From the 1970s her work on spatial and social inequalities was informed by Marxism and this made a significant contribution to the radicalization of human geography.

Two of her books became influential beyond geography too: Capital and land: Landownership by capital in Great Britain (with Alejandrina Catalano, 1978) was a Marxist analysis of capitalist landownership in the UK, while Spatial divisions of labour: Social structures and the geography of production (1984, 1995) showed an alternate way of understanding unbalanced regional development.

Over subsequent years Massey refined the ‘spatial divisions of labour’ exploring the multi-dimensional nature of power and space. Her interest was not only in theorizing ‘space’ and ‘place’ but also in demonstrating their importance to everyday life. In her own words: “A lot of what I’ve been trying to do over the all too many years when I’ve been writing about space is to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live. Most obviously I would say that space is not a flat surface across which we walk … it’s like a pincushion of a million stories.” She examined the concepts of space and place at different scales, engaging in critiques of globalization, regional development, and the city. Among her many publications were For Space (2005), and World City (2007, 2010).

Massey also engaged in feminism. She was politically active in the women’s movement from the late 1960s. Her activism included support for the wives of miners during the 1984-85 miners’ strike, giving moral and practical support at pickets and being involved in the Women Against Pit Closures movement. However, she found it difficult to include feminism in her academic work. She felt that the intellectual debates that she had within the women’s movement didn’t relate to the debates that were going on within feminist geography. It was some time before she found the right intellectual ‘space’ to engage with it. Her growing involvement in feminist work and her thoughts on the development of a geography of women are found in Space, Place, and Gender (1994), a collection of 11 essays written between 1978 and 1992.

Although Massey engaged in her interests on different scales and in different locations, London, the city where she lived, was a particular focus. Between 1982 and 1985 she was a member of the governing body of the Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB). The board’s role was to evolve and implement the economic policy for London, which involved thinking through some major issues. Fellow board member, John Palmer, remembered how she “would ask searching questions on issues surrounding the advancement of the rights of women and ethnic minorities in the preparation of development strategies for GLEB investments.” Another board member, Robin Murray, described how she “insisted that space was social not just physical: gendered space, class space.” This is one example of how Massey sought to apply academic concepts to contemporary society and then to translate them into concrete projects. She was energised by this engagement as, at the time, the Greater London Council was led by the socialist politician, Ken Livingstone, and their efforts sought to counter the neo-liberal policies being rolled out by the Thatcher government.

Massey lived for many years in the Kilburn area of northwest London and she drew on this for her essay, “A Global Sense of Place.” She walked the reader along Kilburn High Road, the main thoroughfare, describing shops, people, signs and graffiti. Through this she argued for a more contemporary understanding of ‘sense of place’ based less on a particular location and more on the networked reality of globalization.

Although Massey was passionate about London, she did not like many of the changes of recent years. Her book, World City, was a definitive account of how London came to be one of the centres of global finance, and the detrimental effects this had on the city and its inhabitants. She was interested in initiatives for ordinary people reclaiming the city from the super-rich and make it more livable, in the spirit of the radical culture that she was engaged with in the 1980s. For example, she was sympathetic to the Take Back the City group and the Good London project.

It was the marrying of philosophical and conceptual issues on the one hand with political activism on the other that was the signature of Massey’s work throughout her life. Jo Littler and Jeremy Gilbert wrote in an online post after the announcement of her death that “it’s difficult to think of a British scholar of her stature who remained so consistently and directly engaged in immediate political activities alongside rigorous academic work.” She was fiercely committed to creating societies where there is democracy, equality and freedom, and to the creative and radical movements that might bring about such change.

Another outlet for her activist ideas was the journal Soundings, which she founded with Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin in 1995. At one time or another, all three founding editors had been associated with the publications Marxism Today and New Left Review, and through Soundings they aimed to continue within the traditions of the new left. The journal brought together critical thought and transformative action, presenting serious content without being too heavily academic.It remains a space for academics, activists, policy makers and practitioners to engage with one another.

From 2013 Massey, Hall and Rustin collaborated on “The Kilburn Manifesto,” a project mapping the political, economic, social, and cultural nature of the neoliberal system dominating Britain and most of the western world, and arguing for radical alternatives. The manifesto was published in 12 free online monthly installments and subsequently compiled into a book, After Neoliberalism: The Kilburn Manifesto (2015).

Massey remained on the editorial board of Soundings and, as recently as September 2015, wrote a guest editorial entitled “Exhilarating times,” reflecting on the new politiocal directions that may be possible under the Labour Party’s new leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Although Massey’s work was generally associated with contemporary western capitalist society, her work also had an international dimension. For example, she spoke fluent Spanish and spent a year in Nicaragua, writing a book about it (Nicaragua, 1987).

She worked with South African activists during the transitional government, specifically with Frene Ginwala, who later became the first person of color to be Speaker of the South African Parliament. They led a workshop on gender and unpaid labor at a time when such issues were sidelined in economic debate. From this came the publication Gender and economic policy in a democratic South Africa (with Frene Ginwala and Maureen Mackintosh, 1991).

Meanwhile, Massey’s continuing interest in space and power led her to a long standing engagement with political change in Venezuela. She was proud to have been invited to advise Hugo Chavez’ government, and to have had one of her key conceptual phrases – ‘geometries of power’ – directly cited by Chavez in his political speeches. The concept of power-geometry was adopted as a means of thinking through the program of decentralization and equalization of political power, specifically by giving a meaningful political voice to poorer regions and the previously-excluded within the cities. Her work in Venezuela included discussions, lectures, seminars, public meetings and television appearances.

She was also a member of the Editorial Board of Revista Pós, the journal of the School of Architecture and Urbanism of Sao Paulo, Brazil, which publishes research from different academic fields that relate to architecture and the city.

Although Massey formally retired as emeritus professor in 2009 she retained her base at The Open University and continued her active engagement in a number of projects including “The future of landscape and the moving image.” She also continued with speaking engagements and involvement in educational television programs and books, as well as appearing frequently in the media commentating on issues such as industry and regional trends.

It is no understatement that Massey’s ideas, theories and concepts transformed human geography and influenced many scholars. Not only was she a giant within the discipline but she was also widely read and highly influential across a range of other disciplines. Furthermore, her work, along with that of scholars such as David Harvey, established geography as the discipline that can offer a powerful and intellectual critique of capitalism.

Massey’s work earned her numerous awards including the Royal Geographical Society’s Victoria Medal (1994), the Prix Vautrin Lud, considered to be geography’s Nobel Prize (1998), the Swedish Society of Anthropologists and Geographers’ Anders Retzius Medal in Gold (2003), the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Centenary Medal (2003), and the American Association of Geographers’ Presidential Achievement Award (2014). However, due to her vehement anti-establishment feelings, she declined the award of an Order of the British Empire (OBE).

She was made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (1999), the Royal Society of Arts (2000) and the British Academy (2002). Although she never did a PhD herself, she received honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh (2006), National University of Ireland (2006), University of Glasgow (2009), Queen Mary University of London (2010), Harokopio University, Greece (2012), and the University of Zurich, Switzerland (2013).

Massey’s passing is a huge loss to geography and the many people who were inspired by her work. The profound impact that she had on people can be seen in the many tributes on the internet that appeared after the announcement of her death. She was a role model for doing socially-relevant academic work, and showed that it was possible to combine rigorous scholarship with political conviction and activism. She was a strong character who said what she thought and could be stubborn, but equally she was warm, caring, encouraging, kind, and generous of spirit, as well as full of humor.

Despite originally coming from Manchester, Massey was a loyal fan of Liverpool football team and often went to watch matches. Her other passion was bird-watching, which she often enjoyed while visiting her sister, Hilary, in the English Lake District.

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Randall A. Detro

Randall Detro, former professor of geography at Nicholls State University and Director of the Placename Survey of Louisiana, passed away on March 7, 2016.

Randall Augustus Detro was born in 1931 and grew up in Red River Parish, Louisiana, a state to which he stayed devoted for his whole life.

Detro was primarily a cultural geographer but his work spanned many aspects of the human and physical landscape of Louisiana.

He had a particular interest in toponymy. His doctoral thesis, completed at Louisiana State University in 1970, was entitled “Generic Terms in the Place Names of Louisiana: An Index to the Cultural Landscape.” He published a number of other papers and book chapters on the toponymy of Louisiana, and also served as the Director of the Placename Survey of Louisiana. With Jesse Walker he compiled the work of Meredith (Pete) F. Burrill on geographic names in The Wonderful World of Geographic Names (Louisiana State University, 2004).

He contributed to a range of studies on human interactions with the natural environment of the Mississippi delta region, including settlement regression along the Louisiana coastal marsh, the coastal marsh as a recreational resource, the socioeconomic conditions of the deltaic region, the development of the marsh buggy as a means of transportation in difficult terrain, an environmental impact statement on deep draft access to Baton Rouge ports, the development of the sulphur industry and mines in Louisiana, and a historical atlas of shipwrecks in the Mississippi River.

Detro taught in the Department of Geography at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and also served as Director of the university’s library. He was a long time member of the American Association of Geographers and presented his distinctive Louisiana-focused research at many Annual Meetings of the AAG and the Southeast Division.

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Robert J. French

Robert French, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Southern Maine, also known for his knowledge, love and collection of road maps, passed away on March 3, 2016 at the age of 80.

Robert Joseph French was born on January 3, 1936, in Boston, MA. He grew up in the Brookline area of the city and graduated from Brookline High School in 1953. In subsequent studies he received a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1957, a master’s degree in education from Northeastern University in 1967, and a master’s degree in geography from Clark University in 1972.

He joined the faculty at the University of Southern Maine in 1969 and taught geography in the Department of Geography-Anthropology for the next 27 years. One of the major areas of his research was prehistoric human settlement and subsistence along the southern Maine coast and he was co-director of a project which carried out coastal archaeological surveys in and around Casco Bay.

French retired from the university in 1995 and spent the next three years as coordinator of the Maine Geographic Alliance, an organisation of which he was a charter member. He was also a judge at the Maine State Geography Bee for several years.

He also pursued his geographical passion: road maps. His interest in antique cars had led him to collect old road maps over the years, and he was fascinated by the place of these maps in American culture. Prior to the advent of the automobile, ordinary people didn’t use road maps as they had no need for them; maps were also relatively expensive. But as Americans took to the road, gasoline companies started to offer free road maps. Their cover art promoted a romance of the open road, a sense of adventure and discovery. French argued that this changed map-making and let to the democratization of cartography.

Many of his maps went on display in 2001 at an exhibition he guest-curated called “Road Maps: The American Way,” held at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education in Portland.

Several years later, he donated 4,500 road maps from his private collection to the Osher Map Library and his exhibit was put on display at Harvard University. Following the exhibits, he wrote a series of articles on roadmaps for the Roadmap Collectors’ Association.

In 2011, he self-published a novel, Road Map to Yesterday, a tale of the 1940’s involving life, love and war. The story links small town coastal Maine to people and events ranging from local scale to the broad expanse of the Pacific.

Another of French’s retirement projects was the design and building of a home in St. George, Maine, using old and new technologies. The land surrounding the home – 30 acres of spruce-fir forest and meadows – was placed in conservation with the Georges River Land Trust, part designated as wild land and part as managed forest.

Other hobbies included antique auto and bicycle restoration, hiking, fishing, tending the forest and land, and exploring Maine with his family. He was also a volunteer archivist at the Owls Head Transportation Museum which has a world-class collection of pre-1940s aircraft ane vehicles.

He leaves behind Shirley, his loving wife of 50 years, children Laura and Charles and their families including two granddaughters, Katherine and Elizabeth.

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Heidi G. Frontani

Heidi Frontani, a professor of geography at Elon University for more than 17 years, and a development geographer with particular interests in Africa, died suddenly of a heart attack on February 26, 2016, at the age of 50.

Heidi Glaesel was born on April 19, 1965, and grew up in Queens, New York. She attended Cornell University as an undergraduate, receiving a bachelor’s degree in human development.

In 1987 she participated in Harvard University Institute for International Development’s “World Teach” program. She spent 18 months at a secondary school in rural, western Kenya, teaching geography, mathematics and biology to ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade students. This experience was the start of a life-long passion for Africa.

On returning to the U.S., Frontani turned her academic attention to geography, studying at the University of Wisconsin at Madison for a master’s degree then a doctorate, but in both cases pursuing her interest in Africa. Her master’s thesis, entitled “The Masai and the Masai Mara: People, Park, and Policy,” examined the relationship between park management approach and conservation effect, particularly the extent to which participatory, bottom-up co-management can not only protect biodiversity, but also local people’s livelihoods.

In 1993 she received a university travel award to visit Kenya for research on “Resource Conservation on the Kenyan Coast: A Study in the Political Ecology of the Malindi-Watamu Biosphere Reserve.” The following year she received a Fulbright-Hayes Group Projects Abroad scholarship for intensive Swahili language training in the summer and a Foreign Language and Area Studies scholarship to study Swahili during the next academic year. This was all leading towards her doctoral fieldwork for which she received a Fulbright Dissertation Fellowship.

This field research during 1995 and 1996 involved two months in Tanzania and ten months in Kenya to investigate nearshore, indigenous marine resources. She was based at a marine conservation office but spent many weeks visiting and living with fisher people and their relatives, conducting interviews and participant-observation. She was interested in the nature and extent of an indigenous marine management system and fledgling co-management initiatives near marine protected areas, as well as documenting changes in fishing methods over time. Her dissertation, completed in 1997, was entitled “Fishers, Parks, and Power: The Socio-Environmental Dimensions of Marine Resource Decline and Protection on the Kenya Coast.” She subsequently did some comparative work with participatory fisheries management in the U.S.

Following her PhD, Frontani spent two years in Ghana teaching high school-aged kids before joining the faculty at Elon University, North Carolina, as professor of geography. Although U.S.-based, her passion for Africa continued. She broadened out from her specialist interest in fisheries and protected areas to development studies more broadly.

At Elon she taught courses including International Development, and Africans and African Development. She also contributed to Elon’s Core Curriculum, the set of courses and experiences that are shared by every undergraduate. Director of the Core Curriculum program, Jeffrey Coker said, “Heidi has been a beloved and just invaluable faculty member within the core curriculum for a long time. She has been one our best contributors to the global experience course. She has also taught core capstones that were fantastic. … Anybody that ever met Heidi would just be in awe of her passion for Africa, for her students, for teaching … She was always giving and contributing to the larger community.”

Frontani shifted much of her research focus from East Africa to West Africa. Among her published research were studies on China’s development initiatives in Ghana, the social integration of Togolese and Liberian refugees in Ghana, and Peace Corps and National Service programs in Ghana. She also published several encyclopedia entries in Oxford Bibliographies Online: African Studies and The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, as well as more than 30 book reviews on Africa, resource management, parks, development, and fisheries.

At the time of her death, she was working on two books: one on the Rockefeller Foundation’s and Wellcome Trust’s disease control and public health initiatives in the early twentieth century to several countries in Africa that were then British colonies, and another on outstanding African leaders.

As well as being a popular teacher and active scholar, Frontani held a number of leadership roles at Elon University over the years. She served as coordinator of the geography program from 1998 to 2011, chair of the Department of History and Geography from 2009 to 2012, and interim coordinator of the African and African-American Studies program from 2014 to 2015. She was the faculty adviser for Visions, Elon’s environmental magazine, and for Gamma Phi Beta, the Geography Honor Society. Recently she was also the co-chair of the implementation and assessment team for the Presidential Task Force on the Black Student, Faculty, and Staff Experiences.

Frontani recognized how strong mentors had been important to her own development and committed to being a student mentor herself. Although Elon did not offer majors in her areas of specialization of geography and African studies, she mentored students with these interests, particularly through the Periclean Scholars program, an academic service learning program which involved students in sustainable development projects, with a different country the focus each year.

She was the faculty mentor for the 2010 class of Periclean Scholars who, under her guidance and in conjunction with Ghanaian partners, built and established a health center in Kpoeta, Ghana. Charles Irons, chair of the History and Geography Department said, “She is the most effective Periclean Scholars mentor that we’ve had and has mentored students to make really profound contributions.”

In 2014, Frontani was named one of three senior faculty to be a Senior Faculty Research Fellows through the two academic school years of 2015-2016 and 2016-2017. Furthermore, in Fall 2015 she was one of seven faculty members who was named a Leadership Scholar and was involved in teaching Leadership Research.

Frontani was committed to promoting ‘development from within’ rather than development driven by outsiders’ aid and intervention. She wrote a weekly blog, African Development Successes, to share excellent initiatives that Africans are taking to make their communities, countries, and the world a better place. The aim was to counter the overly negative coverage of Africa that dominates the mass media. Her stories, which were also compiled into a searchable database, profiled a vast array of effective leaders from across the continent from up-and-coming entrepreneurs, to sports stars, to established statesmen. The blog was read by thousands of people in more than thirty countries, and the stories have been reproduced in newspapers and periodicals internationally.

Frontani became a member of the American Association of Geographers in 1999, and regularly presented papers at Annual Meetings and Regional Division conferences, as well as serving as Chair of the Research Grants Committee from 2006 to 2009. She was also a member of the African Studies Association and the Ghana Research Council.

Heidi Frontani devoted her life’s work to a deeper public understanding of the African continent and the development that spurs its progress. She will be remembered as an inspiring teacher and a tireless advocate for a shared global understanding. Leo Lambert, President of Elon University said, “We are a stronger university because of Heidi. The students she taught and mentored, and the values they carry into this world, are perhaps her greatest legacy.” Family and friends around the world will miss her greatly.

She is survived by her husband, Dr. Michael Frontani, an associate professor in the School of Communications at Elon University, as well as her parents, Erika and Henry Glaesel, her sister and family, and her son, Dante.

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Kenneth White

Kenneth White, a soils geographer and fluvial geomorphologist, who spent many years at Texas A&M University and the Australian National University, passed away on February 15, 2016, at the age of 75.

Kenneth L. White, known to friends as “Kenny,” was born on October 15, 1940, in Chicago. In 1962, while working at Baxter Laboratories, he met Naomi Ellen Fletcher, who was attracted to his sense of humor, and they married in Ingleside, Illinois, the following year. By that time, White was serving in the Air Force and they immediately moved to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.

The next move was to southern California where White studied and taught at California State College at Fullerton then in the Soils Laboratory at the University of California, Riverside. He received a doctorate from there in 1976 and was immediately recruited as assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University. The head of department, Campbell White Pennington, was making a series of hiring decisions to broaden the scope of the department’s narrow cultural focus and White was brought in as a geomorphologist to strengthen the physical geography program.

White and his other new colleagues were tasked with raising undergraduate enrollments in their respective courses, White’s being Physical Geography and Thematic Cartography. These courses were taught every semester and enrollment began to grow. With his enthusiasm for soil science, students affectionately called him “Dr. Dirt.”

In the late 1970s White was tasked with developing new courses in remote sensing. He was also involved in the expanding graduate program in the department. He taught an introductory graduate class on Processes in Physical Geography and, with human geography colleague Peter Hugill, revived a graduate class in Field Geography. In the first year they took students to Arkansas but were ordered to stop spending money on trips to exotic, ‘foreign’ locations so they subsequently changed the destination to Junction, Texas!

White’s primary research interests were soil geography and fluvial geomorphology. He was particularly concerned with the micromorphology and mineralogy of soils, anaylzing their characteristics using scanning electron microscopy. He also conducted research on geomorphic landforms and landscape sculpturing processes, particularly in riverine environments. Many of his field studies were carried out in southern California and Texas. White was also an enthusiastic adopter of remote sensing, digital image processing, and GIS. Among his publications is a 1993 paper on using GIS as an educational tool.

In 1986, White moved across full-time to the Department of Geology at Texas A&M University. During that time, his research also took him to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he lived for a year.

In 1991 he was awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship. He spent the first three months in Bangladesh affiliated with the Department of Geology at the University of Dhaka. Unfortunately political unrest caused his stay in Dhaka to be shortened so he finished his scholarship in Australia at the University of Wollongong where he was based in the Department of Geography but also associated with the Faculty of Engineering.

White took to Australia a computer-based Image Processing and Geographical Information System with which to do collaborative research with faculty members and graduate students. His research aimed to identify and mitigate against natural hazards along the eastern Australia coastal strip. This involved a variety of data sources including satellite data obtained from an altitude of 500 miles, published topographic sheets at a scale of 1:25000, specific site engineering data, and other sources. He also spent time looking at fluvial chronologies, the process of fluvial avulsion, and the engineering geology problems of the east coast of Australia.

White and his wife subsequently moved more permanently to Australia and he taught at the Australian National University in Canberra for a number of years. They remained in Australia after retirement until 2003 when they decided to move back to the United States to be closer to their only granddaughter. They made their home in Mountain View, Arkansas, where they volunteered for many years at the Ozark Folk Center.

White was a member of the American Association of Geographers from 1970 to 2004. He was also a certified professional photogrammetrist and member of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, including serving as president of the Texas-Louisiana Region. In addition, he was a member of the Soil Science Society of America, the Association of Engineering Geologists, Gamma Theta Epsilon, and Sigma Xi.

After his wife’s death in 2014, White moved to Hot Springs Village, Arkansas, where he pursued his hobbies of woodwork, fishing and historic muzzle-loading firearms by joining clubs within the community. He was also involved in Christ Lutheran Church. However, his interest in topography and geoscience never diminished. A few weeks before his death, he took his family to Costa Rica where he insisted on wading into the sea so that he could climb into a fishing boat for a trip beyond the reefs.

In addition to his wife, White was preceded in death by their second daughter, Johanna Sue. He is survived by his sister, Darlene, his two children, Heidi and Kenneth Jr., and his cherished granddaughter, Kelsea Ann.

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David J. De Laubenfels

David de Laubenfels, emeritus professor in the Department of Geography at Syracuse University, and a biogeographer who was an expert on tropical conifers, passed away on February 6, 2016, at the age of 90.

David John de Laubenfels was born in 1925 in Pasadena, California. His father, Max Walker de Laubenfels, was a noted marine biologist which perhaps influenced the development of David’s interests in the natural world.

After serving in the Quartermaster Corps of the United States Army during the Second World War, de Laubenfels attended Colgate University, NY. As part of his undergraduate studies, he completed “A Geographic Study in the Hamilton Area, New York.” Having graduated in 1949 he moved to the University of Illinois for postgraduate studies. His master’s degree, completed in 1950, included a thesis entitled “Marketing Geography of Open Display Cold Storage Equipment” while his doctorate dissertation, completed in 1953, was entitled “The Temuco Region, A Geographic Study in South Central Chile.” Despite the subject matter of these three studies, he was already gravitating towards physical geography and, more particularly, to biogeography.

His first professional appointment was at the University of Georgia, starting as Assistant Professor in 1953 and moving to Associate Professor in 1958. In 1959 he joined the faculty at Syracuse University where he remained for the rest of his career, attaining the rank of full Professor in 1971 and retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1993.

De Laubenfels studied the variation of vegetation from place to place. Among his many publications in biogeography are the books A Geography of Plants and Animals (1970) and Mapping the World’s Vegetation: Regionalization of Formations and Flora (1975).

He carried out various studies in the United States, publishing articles on the soil and vegetation of New York State, the characteristics of the Ozark Upland in the Midwest, the nature and boundaries of the Corn Belt, conifers of southeast, and the semi-tropical woodland of Georgia. He also did a comparative study of Australian forests with vegetation of similar climatic areas in the Americas.

However, it is for his work on the taxonomy of conifers, particularly tropical conifers, that de Laubenfels is known throughout the world. In carrying out his studies, he traveled whenever possible to the actual locations where the plants were established so that he could see them in their many natural growth forms. He had a particular interest in the south Pacific, carrying out field expeditions to locations including New Caledonia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Moluccas. New Caledonia was of particular interest due to the rare conifers there; on one of his expeditions he discovered a parasitic conifer and published his finds in Science (1959). He also studied conifers in Latin America including Costa Rica, Venezuela, Peru and Uruguay.

His first major taxonomic revision in conifers was published in 1969: “A Revision of the Malesian and Pacific Rainforest Conifers, I Podocarpaceae.” In 1972, his chapter on “Gymnospermes” published in Flore de la Nouvelle-Caledonie et Dependances was a seminal piece of work because of the importance and uniqueness of this group of plants. Another major taxonomic publication, Coniferales, Flora Malesiana was published in 1988. Over the years, de Laubenfels identified over 100 new species in the tropics; in the photograph above he is examining Podocarpus beecherae, one of those he named. He also had one species named in his honor – Araucaria laubenfelsii, commonly known as the De Laubenfels’ araucaria – which is native to southern New Caledonia.

Outside of his taxonomic and plant geography work, de Laubenfels had a wide variety of interests on topics such as the geographic origins of human development and the origins of language. He also published a book on physics entitled It’s Hard to Believe in Infinity (1992). Meanwhile in another work, “Where Sherman Passed By” (1957), he highlighted General Sherman’s march through Georgia, walking the entire route using the maps of his great-grandfather, John (Rziha) Laube de Laubenfels, chief topographical engineer for one of Sherman’s columns.

De Laubenfels joined the American Association of Geographers in 1949 and was involved in the Regional Division that included New York State, presenting papers at regional meetings including “Plant Geography Versus Vegetation Geography” (1962) and “The Variations of Vegetation from Place to Place” (1968).

He was also a member of the American Conifer Society and British Conifer Society. His love of nature was reflected locally too: he was a long-time member of the Onondaga chapter of the Adirondack Mountain Club.

David de Laubenfels will be remembered for his major contributions to biogeography and his unparalleled expertise in tropic conifers. He had a remarkable career, with academic publications spanning from 1950 to 2015 when he was in his 90th year.

He is survived by his loving wife, Janet, three daughters, five step-children, several grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, as well as three siblings. He was predeceased by his son, Eric.

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Harold M. Rose

Harold Rose, distinguished professor emeritus of geography and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and pioneer in research on race and segregation, passed away on February 2, 2016, at the age of 86.

Harold Milton Rose was born on January 8, 1930 in Nashville, Tennessee. He was raised by his grandparents, of whom his grandfather worked in a phosphate mine and his grandmother as a domestic.

Despite skipping several grades in school, he went to college at the age of 16 – somewhat by chance – having had heard that a friend had applied to Tennessee State, a historically black college, and been accepted. Rose paid his way through his four years of college by working in the cafeteria every day.

Having graduated with a degree in history and geography in 1950, Rose spent time in the Army then returned to Tennessee State to take some further geography courses. There he was encouraged by a professor to apply for a master’s program at Ohio State University.

He taught for a few years at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, also a historically black college, before returning to Ohio State University for a doctorate in geography. His thesis, completed in 1960, was entitled “An Analysis of Land Use in Central-North Florida: A Study in Conservation.”

In 1962, Rose received a joint appointment in the departments of geography and urban affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), one of the first tenured African American professors at the university. Although he was sought by other universities, Rose spent his entire career at UWM. This included serving as chair of the Department of Urban Affairs (1970-1973 and 1974-1977), Department of Afro-American Studies (1977-1978), and Department of Geography (1990-1994).

Although Rose began his academic career exploring issues of natural resource management, he shifted focus after arriving in Milwaukee in 1962. He had moved to a deeply segregated city during a time of heightened civil rights activism around housing and school segregation. He pioneered research on the conditions faced by African Americans and went on to build a national reputation in the field, specifically how racism and racial policy affected urbanization.

Rose’s foundational work on racial discrimination and segregation challenged urban geographers to consider the ghetto as produced through both spatial and social processes. His scholarship established that examining segregation was not just about mapping the distribution of racial groups across the urban landscape, but also about understanding the social processes and attitudes about race that produced those patterns.

He conducted community-engaged research field research on the quality of life in black communities, the black ghetto, black residential mobility and interregional migration, high rates of homicide in many black communities, and the experience of blacks and Cubans in Miami.

Among his many publications on race, segregation and violence were the books “The Black ghetto: a spatial behavioral perspective” (1971), “Black Suburbanization: Access to Improved Quality of Life or Maintenance of the Status Quo?” (1976), and “Race, Place and Risk: Black Homicide in Urban America” (1990, coauthored with Paula McClain).

His academic research was driven by his passion for social justice. Aside from his scholarship, he was extensively involved in community service, from his early work with the Milwaukee Urban League to his seat on the Board of Directors for the community-based North Milwaukee State Bank.

Rose retired from UWM in 1995 as distinguished professor emeritus, after thirty-one years of teaching, pioneering scholarship, and a remarkable career of mentoring and public scholarship. The university established the Harold M. Rose Lecture series focused on race and urban social justice in tribute to his legacy to the department, the university and the discipline of geography.

Rose joined the American Association of Geographers in 1955. In 1976 he was elected its President, the first – and to date only – African American to hold that position. He used his platform to challenge urban racial segregation and discrimination. His presidential address entitled “Geographies of Despair” (subsequently published in the Annals of the AAG in 1978) voiced the need to expand research into the experiences of African Americans.

In 1996 Rose was awarded the AAG’s Lifetime Achievement Honor and in 2012 an award was created in his name – the Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racist and Practice in Geography – to honor geographers who have advanced the discipline through their research on racism, and who have also had on impact on anti-racist practice. To date the award has been given to Donald Deskins, Jr. (2013), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2014), and Bobby Wilson (2015).

With the passing of Harold Rose, geography has lost an extraordinarily important figure. His research made significant contributions to geographic understandings of segregation and racism as a socio-spatial process. His work was courageous in challenging racism at a time when very few in geography even acknowledged racism and its consequences. He was also an exemplar of how scholars can go beyond theoretical understandings of social practices to engage actual communities and to make a difference in human life. Rose regretted that his life required him to be consumed with issues of race, but he knew that to be less involved was ‘simply not possible.’

Harold Rose was humble, kind and generous. He will be fondly remembered by many former colleagues and students at UWM and across the United States. He is survived by his lovingly wife of 60 years, Ann Louise, their son, Gregory, a granddaughter and three great-grandchildren.

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Susan R. Brooker-Gross

Susan Brooker-Gross, who spent almost 40 years at Virginia Tech, first in the geography department then in university administration, passed away suddenly on January 2, 2016, at the age of 65, due to complications after surgery.

Susan Ruth Gross was born in 1950 in Ohio. She was intellectually precocious and, after excelling in the Lake School District, she attended Bowling Green State University, where she earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in geography.

Having graduated in 1973, she moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to pursue a doctorate, also in geography. Her thesis, completed in 1977, was entitled “Spatial Organization of the News Wire Services in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” Looking at the new technology of the telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century, she examined how the expansion of physical infrastructure brought about socio-cultural change, from a focus on local communities to a nationally integrated society. Aspects of her thesis were subsequently published and she continued her interest in the geography of news media throughout her career, publishing articles and chapters on topics ranging from 19th century newspapers to 24-hour global TV news.

Brooker-Gross joined the faculty at Virginia Tech in 1977 as an assistant professor of geography. She was promoted to associate professor in 1983 and chaired the geography department from 1990 to 1993. Geography professor and longtime colleague Jim Campbell said, “Susan, as one of our department’s early faculty members, was a major contributor to our growth and stature at the university.”

Her research centered on urban geography, and explored the impact of gender, technology, and socioeconomic factors on human populations. A particular strand of her work was commuting in non-metropolitan areas and the impact of employment on the household, for example finding child care in rural areas. Much of her field research looked at the area around Blacksburg, Virginia, where she lived, and specifically at households with university employees.

Over time, Brooker-Gross’s interests turned to the administrative aspects of higher education. In 1993, she moved from the geography department to the provost’s office. She started as associate provost for undergraduate programs and became deeply involved with the transition of student records to electronic formats. This work put her into contact with planners and developers in information technology, and in 1997, she joined the Division of Information Technology.

Her first role was as the student systems implementation leader for Banner, the university’s comprehensive application for managing student and personnel information. She later became the Director of Policy and Communications and was responsible for planning news and communications for the Division of Information Technology, as well as developing many of the policies that govern the university’s data access, maintenance, and security.

Her sharp intellect and broad experience at the university made her a valuable administration and planning asset for the division and her contributions to the university will be greatly missed. John Krallman, director of information and technology business and financial affairs said, “She was deeply intellectual, and had a way of thinking about problems that was truly different. Her consideration of IT challenges often yielded better, more thorough solutions than we could otherwise have provided, and we relied on her innovative approach, as well as her skill as a writer and editor.”

Brooker-Gross was a lifetime member of the American Association of Geographers, and actively involved in the Southeast Regional Division including serving as its President. She was also active in her home community of Blacksburg. Together with her husband, they built and then inhabited a winsome homestead in the Blacksburg countryside. In 2001, she decided to learn the flute, and quickly showed sufficient skill to join the Blacksburg Community Band, with whom she thoroughly enjoyed rehearsing and performing.

Susan will be fondly remembered by many friends and neighbors in Blacksburg, as well as colleagues at Virginia Tech. She was predeceased by her husband of 35 years, James E. Brooker, who died in May 2015. She is survived by their son, John Brooker, and her brother, Jeffrey.

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Harry “Hal” Bowman

Hal Bowman, a GIS professional and geography graduate of both Johns Hopkins University and The Ohio State University, was among the 14 people killed in the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, on December 2, 2015. He was 46 years old.

Harry Albert Bowman was born on June 8, 1969, and grew up in Jacobus, York County, Pennsylvania. He attended Dallastown Area High School where he was a National Merit Scholar and graduated second in his class of 1987. He was also involved in cross country and was a stalwart of the school debate team for several years.

Bowman then attended The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, studying for a BA in geography followed by a MA in geography and environmental engineering, graduating with honors in 1991. He was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity where he served as Community Services chair and was remembered for his charitable efforts including participating in dance marathons and bouncing basketballs for cause fundraisers, and helping at soup kitchens.

In 1993 Bowman moved to The Ohio State University for doctoral studies. Supervised by Morton O’Kelly, he produced a thesis entitled “Optimizing Transportation Infrastructure Improvements for Networks under The Threat of Natural Hazards.” His work concerned retrofitting bridges to improve their resilience to earthquake damage. O’Kelly noted that Bowman worked extremely efficiently to complete an excellent dissertation; he also remembered him as “a special guy” who “had lots of great ideas.”

Having completed his PhD in 1995 he moved to California to work at Esri, establishing himself as a GIS programmer and analyst. He was subsequently appointed as one of the first employees at a new counter-terrorism center at the University of Southern California: the Center for Risk Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE).

CREATE was the first Department of Homeland Security University Center of Excellence, established after the 9/11 attacks. Bowman’s expertise in software, mapping and spatial datasets was applied to evaluating the risk and economic impact of national security threats and terrorist events in order to guide authorities in their planning and decision making. He contributed to many of CREATE’s early projects, including the Risk Analysis Workbench, emergency medical supply distribution software, and a counter-terrorism modeling framework.

In September 2015, just two months before his untimely death, Bowman started a new job as a statistical analyst for Healthy Communities for the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health. He was attending the holiday party for county employees at the Inland Regional Center when a co-worker and his wife entered the room and opened fire.

Bowman had two daughters, aged 15 and 11. He was a devoted father who considered their education of upmost importance, developing their knowledge and curiosity thorough at-home science experiments, summer educational programs, trips to the library, and countless visits to museums of all kinds, as well as helping with homework.

Bowman also loved the outdoors, spending much of his free time hiking. He loved the national parks and intended to volunteer when he retired. He was also a dedicated member of the Roman Catholic Church, and had been involved in teaching confirmation classes.

Friends and former classmates remember Hal Bowman as being intelligent and full of ideas, as well as a good man and a gentle soul. In addition to his two daughters, he is survived by his mother, his brother and sister and their families.

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