Alison Mountz and Kira Williams offer a dramatic and important reworking of the disciplinary history of geography itself with Let Geography Die: Chasing Derwent’s Ghost at Harvard  (MIT Press, 2025). Not only does this important book re-examine a crucial story in the discipline’s institutional trajectory within the U.S. academy, it also offers a creative and compelling model for blending together scholarly history with the reflexive practices of contemporary disciplinary critique. Combining a new reading of archival sources with new questions about queer identity and academic politics, Let Geography Die isn’t just an exhumation of a particular painful moment in geography’s past, but also an inquiry into the discipline’s present and future. It makes compelling reading for any geographers who wish to reflect on how scholarly effort and personal longing fit into the broader systems of disciplines and institutions.

With Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the Expansion of American Empire, Shaina Potts has provided an extraordinary work of scholarship, as well as a distinctly geographical contribution to critical understandings of the co-constitution of capital and empire in the liberal international order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Tracing the territorial dimensions of Anglo-American dominance over international economic law, Potts demonstrates the ways that subtle jurisdictional questions have played a quiet but powerful role in establishing a global regime that favors private property rights and U.S. investments at the expense of national sovereignty, particularly in the Global South. Potts takes a subject which has typically been the exclusive domain of legal scholarship and convincingly demonstrates that it must be treated as a fundamentally geographic question, revealing a hidden map of legal rulings and capital flows which in many ways better explains the state of the world today than the political map of distinctly bordered sovereign nations. Potts adds rich human detail to this study of a system which is designed to be faceless and abstract, and in doing so she combines the synthetic, multi-perspectival and multi-scalar approach which is the hallmark of extraordinary geographical insight.

Apartheid Remains is a richly textured geographical monograph, the product of more than a decade of fieldwork, and sustained theoretical, political, and personal engagement with the industrial and residential landscapes of Durban, South Africa. Sharad Chari brings together a wide range of materials and methods, including documentary photography, music, archival materials, interviews, to investigate the layered remnants, legacies, and afterlives of apartheid and anti-apartheid struggles. Apartheid Remains, although a vibrantly interdisciplinary work, is rooted in geography, both in its commitments to and orientation to place, and in the clarity of Chari’s critical analysis, organized around a series of spatio-temporal conjectures. Over the course of the book, Chari attends to the sedimented accumulations of colonial relations, while remaining attentive to geographies of hope and livingness that exceed the constraints and toxicities of racial capitalism. Apartheid Remains represents significant theoretical and methodological contributions to geography, demonstrating the capaciousness of geographical writing as a critical orientation to possibility.

Displacing Territory: Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in Jordan by Karen Culcasi (University of Chicago Press, 2023) presents a powerful and innovative response to the global crisis of forced displacement. Culcasi argues against framing the “refugee crisis” via the perspective and priorities of the Global North, instead setting her analysis in the Southwest Asia and North Africa region. Her focus on Jordanian refugee policy and the lived experience of refugees creates a provocative reframing of questions about migration and displacement, read against the central themes of power, territory, and place.

Culcasi’s engaging and forceful narrative is based on extensive research that encompasses the conceptual state-territory nexus and the more ambiguous imaginings of spaces including the refugee camps in Jordan. The overall product is an urgent book that represents a significant contribution to political geography, migration, and postcolonial studies. The writing is approachable, compelling, and richly innovative, and is a clear-sighted challenge to contemporary geopolitical imaginaries.

The City after Property: Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit by Sara Safransky (Duke University Press, 2023) begins with a paradox: Detroit’s residents face foreclosures and evictions amidst a crisis of land abandonment. Safransky answers this paradox by weaving theoretically rich insights with detailed research, resulting in a rich account of urban property, racial capitalism, and deindustrialization. Safransky orients geographical scholarship to the possibilities of urban space outside dominant property regimes and centers the work of Black Detroit residents in confronting the challenges to their community.

Safransky’s compelling book is beautifully written and highlights the capacity of urban geography to address contemporary struggles around property and belonging. Her research looks toward futures beyond abandonment, highlighting the contradictions of scarcity amidst abundance that characterizes capitalist policy regimes.

Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resource Frontier  (University of California Press, 2022) by Kristian Karlo Saguin (University of the Philippines) is an outstanding work of geographical scholarship, balancing empirical and conceptual insights that contribute to current interests in urbanization, the infrastructure turn, and environmental change in cities of the Global South. Saguin provides a relational political ecology that describes the unequal ways that Laguna Lake functions as a resource frontier and as a living ecology and is enrolled in and transformed by the urban political ecologies of Manila.

Saguin’s theoretically rich book is the product of extensive research, which represents an important contribution to political ecology and urban geography, as well as the historical geography of the environment. The writing is lively, highly accessible, and nuanced, and it is likely to serve as a model for students seeking to examine other urban places across the globe. This is a timely book and well-deserving of the AAG Meridian Book Award.

Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of the Americas  (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Mirela Altic (University of Zagreb) is a beautifully written masterpiece, representing an impressive work of scholarship, collating over 150 Jesuit maps from different national archives to examine the development of cartography, exploration, and encounter in the New World. By tracing the paths trodden by Jesuit explorers and mapmakers in Spanish, Portuguese, and French New World possessions, Altic reveals the character of the territories crossed by learned men who offered their interpretations on “flat sheets of paper” to foster deep understanding of the cultural landscapes and natural environments traversed.

Not only does she push forward our understanding of the colonial development of the Americas, Altic also offers ample evidence to support the notion that Jesuit epistemology was more closely aligned with the Enlightenment than heretofore often thought. This book contributes a very important chapter to the history of cartography.

Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt  (Duke University Press, 2022) by  Jessica Barnes (University of South Carolina) provides a captivating account of her noteworthy fieldwork in Egypt, which documents the imperative role bread plays in the Arab World. This splendid narrative offers deep insight into aspects of food insecurity that heretofore have largely remained unexplored. Barnes reveals views, tastes, and aromas of a cultural landscape often shaped by the nuances that glue together strategic elements of Egyptian society.

Her analysis bridges the affective and the structural, working connectively across scales from the personal to the global to untangle the varied significance of bread as food, heritage, commodity, and policy object. This work is certain to be considered a major contribution to ethnographic study.

Katherine McKittrick for Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021) presents incredibly rich conceptual and methodological contributions for researchers in human geography and beyond. This innovative book traces how multiple forms of Black scholarship, art, and indeed, Black life, move through and beyond the straits of knowledge systems co-constituted with and emergent from white supremacy. McKittrick’s writing on the forms of productive and destructive erasure that confront Black geographies will become necessary and likely transformative reading for scholars within and beyond the discipline.

Case Watkins for Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia’s Dendê Coast (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is an exemplary piece that is certain to withstand the test of time. The longstanding influence of the author’s academic lineage extending from Sauer to Parsons, Denevan, Turner, Doolittle, and Sluyter is evident in the work. Moreover, through the integration of previously uncovered evidence, this book offers new perspectives and raises questions concerning the impact of racism and colonial ways of knowing on academic scholarship.

Kimberley Kinder for The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) presents a new paradigm emerging in American geographic thought that is oriented toward social justice. Splendidly written, The Radical Bookstore not only offers a glimpse behind the scenes of a unique type of establishment that seeks to bring voice to marginalized peoples and perspectives, but it also challenges scholars to explore social movements through the lens of constructive activism.

Chie Sakakibara, Whale Snow: Iñupiat, Climate Change, and Multispecies Resilience in Arctic Alaska, University of Arizona Press, 2020

Julie Guthman, Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry, University of California Press, 2019

Julie Michelle Klinger, Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes, Cornell University Press, 2017

Eric Sheppard, University of California, Los Angeles

Christopher Sneddon, Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation, The University of Chicago Press

Matthew Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity and the Urban Imagination, MIT Press.

2009 Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory, The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty, University of Minnesota Press.

Richard Schroeder, Africa After Apartheid: South Africa, Race and Nation in Tanzania, Indiana University Press

Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, MIT Press.

Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border, University of Minnesota Press.

James A. Tyner, War, Violence, and Population: Making the Body Count, Guilford Press

Robin Leichenko and Karen O’Brien, Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures, New York: Oxford University Press

Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press/Swallow Press

2012 Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, University of California Press.

Allen J. Scott. On Hollywood: The Place, The Industry, Princeton University Press

Cindi Katz, Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives, University of Minnesota Press

Michael Williams, Deforesting The Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, University of Chicago Press

Aharon Kellerman, The Internet on Earth: A Geography of Information, John Wiley & Sons

John Clarke, Land, Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press

George L. Henderson, California and the Fictions of Capital, Oxford University Press (published in 1999)