Student/Faculty Spotlight
This Spring We Feature Our Graduate Student Austin Kocher and Faculty Member Morton O'Kelly Along With Two Of Our Visiting Scholars, Haiqi Wang and Mouhaman Arabi:
Austin Kocher:
"I am a PhD student in the department of geography, and my research is in human geography. Deaf Geographies is a project that includes graduate students and faculty in several departments in North America and Europe. Our goal is to understand the "Deaf Experience" historically and within contemporary society. We also seek to understand how the existence of signed languages and Deaf culture interrupt, reflect, or transform traditional social and cultural theories that assume that language is spoken, and the bias of written texts towards phonological transcription. Space and place - the core concepts of geography - are central themes in this collaboration."
Haiqi Wang:
One of our visiting scholars this Spring is Dr. Haiqi Wang from the China University of Petroleum at Qingdao. Haiqi received his Ph.D. degree in GIScience from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006. Haiqi is currently an associate professor in the College of Geo-resources and Information and his major research interests include spatial statistics, spatial optimization, and spatial data mining algorithms. He will be with us until September. His office is Derby 1120. Please stop by to visit Haiqi, he will be excited to talk to you!
I am Mouhaman Arabi I teach at the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Higher Institute of the Sahel, the University of Maroua in the Extreme North of Cameroon (West Central Africa). I am presently a visiting scholar in the department of Geography where I work with Prof Ningchuan Xiao. The theme of my research is "The spatiotemporal epidemiology of cholera in the Extreme North of Cameroon". This research will involve the application of GIS, spatial analysis and environmental modelling. I am also interested in regional development planning. Please stop by and chat with Arabi.
Morton O'Kelly:
Morton O'Kelly's latest paper is on a very old subject -- the northern boundary of Ohio. He traces the history and mapping of the boundary between the US and Canada as it emerged after the Treaty of Paris. The paper also continues to explore the importance geographical aspects of the Great Lakes. While these matters may seem to have been settled long ago, it is important to note that there are both current controversies involving the Great Lakes, and that Geographers have expertise and interest in the exploration of this major geographical feature of our region.
The paper appears in the January 2012 issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, our discipline's flagship journal.
On a personal note about this scholarship, Dr. O'Kelly, who is also noted for his work on mathematical models of transport networks, found it quite challenging to review such a large amount of archival material. The digital map collections of the Library of Congress are a tremendous resource for his work. Image is from, Detail from Mitchell map. ©British Library Board, K Top CXVIII, 49b. (Color figure available online in Annals Article.)
M.E. OKelly, 2012. The Role of Geographic Expertise in International Border Disputes: a Study of the Middle of Lake Erie through Historical and Cartographic Perspectives. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(1), 67-83.
