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Greetings from the 5th Floor of McCone! As you’ll see below, another busy year is in full swing: students, staff and faculty in the field, in the archives, giving lectures and conducting interviews. We wanted to give our extended community a sense of what’s going on.
2016-2017 will be an important year for us. By year’s end, six faculty will have retired in a two-year span. We will also have completed an important departmental review, including a detailed self-study, numerous campus-level appraisals and an external review committee. It’s an opportunity to put our core principles to the test: critical, reflexive, empirically grounded inquiry that pushes us, individually and collectively, to discover new ways to understand and change the world.
We hope you enjoy the brief updates below,
visit our website
to learn more, and get in touch with your own news and ideas.
– Nathan Sayre, Department Chair
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Follow Us on Twitter and Facebook
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Since this newsletter only comes out a few times per year, you can stay in touch with the day to day events around the department by
following us on Twitter or
Liking our Facebook page, where we post about upcoming colloquium talks, special events, departmental news, and publications by Berkeley geographers. We also link to
YouTube videos of colloquium talks when they’re published, so you can join the conversation started by our guest speakers even if you can’t make it to McCone.
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We hope you’ll consider
making a donation
, large or small, to support the unique and vibrant community that is Berkeley Geography. Three and a half decades ago, the State of California paid about 80 percent of all the costs of running the world’s greatest public university. Today that figure is about 12 percent. It’s a challenge as big as any we’ve faced before. Your donation will help us in many ways, including: undergraduate field trips; graduate student travel to conferences, workshops, and research sites; and the weekly Colloquium series, which brings speakers from near and far to share their research. Please
contact Department Chair Nathan Sayre if you would like to learn more.
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What makes Berkeley Geography Special?
A Recent Graduate Reminisces
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“The geography department is like no other. It was the first time I felt like I belonged at Cal, and it continues to make me feel connected to the campus. I had the opportunity to join in on this year’s Geog 140B field trip again, and had a blast getting to know more geomorphology students, along with more opportunities to just chat with Dan and Kurt. On the last leg of the drive back to Berkeley, a friend on the trip asked about my overall college experience. I told him that if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing.” –Rebecca Wang, '15
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Rebecca Wang is known for her
incredible photographs and timelapse videos taken during Professor Cuffey's geomorphology field trips. She actually started out at Cal as a pre-med student, but was eventually overwhelmed by Berkeley's massive biology department. Fortunately, a friend and mentor told her about her experience as a Geography major. That led to an appointment with
Marjorie, which led to a change in major. At the recommendation of former graduate student Adam Romero, she enrolled in Geog 140A,
Professor Kurt Cuffey's course on physical landscapes. She says, "Professor Cuffey's courses in geomorphology restored my confidence in being able to perform well and genuinely enjoy science courses." She graduated in December 2015 and recently accepted an internship with Vollmar Natural Lands Consulting, a small company situated in North Berkeley, where she will be conducting ecological and geomorphological research.
See more of her field trip photos...
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Self Portrait by Rebecca Wang, Tuttle Creek Campground, Lone Pine
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Graduate Students in the Field
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Morgan examines a 2m thick compressed radon barrier
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Morgan Williams studies the rates and qualities of soil change on engineered soil systems designed for the 1,000 year containment of low level radioactive wastes. Morgan has designed and commissioned a mobile soil lab (The S.S. Hilgard) to support rural field work in the desert southwest and to show that a PhD can also be quite fun. Read more...
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Camilla Hawthorne is currently based in Italy, where she studies activism among the children of African immigrants who were born or raised in Italy. Her research explores the diverse ways in which the children of African immigrants in Italy have laid claim to Italianness in the seemingly paradoxical context of both the growing Italian citizenship reform movement and the ongoing southern European economic and refugee crises. Read more about her research...
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Camilla (far right, on stage) participates in a discussion with Italian-Eritrean filmmaker Medhin Paolos and Dutch-Caribbean artist Quinsy Gario as part of a session she organized for the Black Europe Summer School
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A New Cohort of Berkeley Geography Graduate Students
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Geography 200A, currently taught by Nathan Sayre, now includes field trips. Here, Richard Walker and Gray Brechin discuss the history of banking in San Francisco with this year's cohort
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Adam Jadhav is our newest recipient of the prestigious Berkeley Fellowship, and he follows from a long line of impressive graduate students to enter our Ph.D. program. Read more...
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Adam in the archive at the Fishery Survey of India, Mumbai, 2012
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We've joined the BloomSky Network
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Dan Plumlee proudly shows off our new instrument
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The Geography Department has joined the BloomSky weather camera network. The network is a community of users that have deployed BloomSky’s proprietary camera device which captures a fisheye view of the sky and automatically loads an image every five minutes onto their site under our station reference page. Check us out on the
BloomSky website.
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Eron Budi and
Dan Plumlee set up the camera to capture our unique view of the Golden Gate from the rooftop of McCone Hall. The camera is centered on our westward view, with the Golden Gate Bridge at bottom center. The camera records the image, plus real time temperature, humidity, pressure and ultraviolet radiation data.
Go to the
webpage to see our current sky snapshot and data report, as well as yesterday’s daytime time-lapse sky movie and an hourly forecast. The BloomSky app will provide all this, plus greater access to past weather time-lapse movies as well as a simple, two-week, daily forecast.
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Scholarships, Fellowships, Awards, and Placements
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Graduate Students:
Seth Denizen received the Bernard Nietschmann Field Study Award from the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers;
Sherine Ebadi was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship;
Jeff Martin won the Brechin-Chlebowski Award (The Gray Brechin and Robert Chlebowski Endowed Graduate Student Support Fund in Geography); Gustavo Oliveira is a Visiting Scholar at the College of Humanities and Social Development, Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Yangling, China; and Jesse Rodenbiker was awarded a Fulbright-Hays DDRA and Confucius China Studies Research PhD Fellowship
Undergraduates:
Daniel Kelly won the California Alumni Association Leadership award;
Juan Manuel Velez was accepted into the Haas Scholars Program
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Placements:
Javier Arbona is Assistant Professor in American Studies and Design (dual appointment) at the University of California, Davis;
Jennifer Greenburg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University;
Greta Marchesi is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at Dartmouth;
William Nardin will join the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in March 2017 as an Assistant Professor; and
Alexander Tarr is Assistant Professor of Geography at Worcester State University
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Michael Watts takes Berlin
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Michael Watts was awarded the Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy for the Fall of 2016, appointed as the Siemens Fellow. The American Academy in Berlin was founded in 1994 at the initiative of Richard Holbrooke, then the American ambassador to Germany. Rooted in Berlin, the independent and mainly privately funded institution is committed to maintaining the long-term intellectual, cultural, and political ties between the United States and Germany. Each year, the Academy awards two dozen Berlin Prize Fellowships for a semester each to scholars, writers, and artists from the United States. Fellows who come from the humanities, social sciences, and arts pursue independent projects in a residential community at the lakeside Villa Arnhold, in Wannsee. The Academy's fellows share their work with German colleagues and with Berlin audiences at the Academy's public lectures, film screenings, concerts, and other events. Watts is working on a project entitled
Life without Authority: Frontier Insurgencies in West Africa.
He will be delivering lectures in Zurich, Copenhagen, Vienna and Berlin. To make use of the extraordinary city of Berlin, he has purchased a 1966 Diamant bicycle made at the Karl Marx factory in the GDR. It is a death trap.
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