Matthew Farish
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Associate Professor Department of Geography and Program in Planning |
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RESEARCH
I am a historical geographer, and much of my work has been concerned with relationships between militarization and geographical knowledge in the twentieth-century United States. This has led to three overlapping projects:
1. A history of geographical thought in the U.S. from 1940-1960. My book The Contours of America's Cold War was published in the fall of 2010 by the University of Minnesota Press.
2. A history of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, the radar chain constructed from Alaska to Greenland in the 1950s as part of the continental defence network. This project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), is a joint effort with P. Whitney Lackenbauer, a historian at St. Jerome's University (University of Waterloo). We plan to complete a book manuscript on the subject in 2011.
3. A history of American military research on nature in the twentieth century. This is a long-term initiative; my emphasis to date has been on climate laboratories built to simulate 'hostile environments'.
My broader interests include North American urban culture (particularly from the 1940s-1980s); journalism, advertising, and propaganda; and 'popular' forms of geography.
PUBLICATIONS
Books
Matthew Farish, The Contours of America’s
Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010)
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Matthew Farish, "The Lab and the Land: Overcoming the Arctic in Cold War Alaska," Isis (forthcoming)
Matthew Farish, “Creating Cold War Climates: The Laboratories of American Globalism,” in John R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 51-84.
Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, "High Modernism in the North: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik," Journal of Historical Geography 35.3 (2009), 517-544.
P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Matthew Farish, “The Cold War on Canadian Soil: Militarizing a Northern Environment,” Environmental History 12.4 (2007), 921-950.
Matthew Farish, “Panic, Civility, and the Homeland,” in War, Citizenship, Territory, eds. D. Cowen and E. Gilbert (New York: Routledge, 2007), 97-118.
Matthew Farish, “Targeting the Inner Landscape,” in Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, eds. D. Gregory and A. Pred (New York: Routledge, 2007), 255-271.
Trevor J. Barnes and Matthew Farish, “Between Regions: Science, Militarism, and American Geography from World War to Cold War,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96.4 (2006), 807-826. [Reprinted in J. Nicholas Entrikin, ed., Regions: Critical Essays in Human Geography (Ashgate, 2008), and Derek Gregory and Noel Castree, eds., Human Geography, v. 1 (SAGE, 2011)]
Matthew Farish, “Frontier Engineering: From the Globe to the Body in the Cold War Arctic,” The Canadian Geographer 50.2 (2006), 177-196.
Matthew Farish, “Archiving Areas: The Ethnogeographic Board and the Second World War,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95.3 (2005), 663-679.
Matthew Farish, “Cities in Shade: Urban Geography and the Uses of Noir,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23.1 (2005), 95-118.
Matthew Farish, “Another Anxious Urbanism: Defence and Disaster in Cold War America,” in Cities, War and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics, ed. S. Graham (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 93-109.
Matthew Farish, “Disaster and Decentralization: American Cities and the Cold War,” Cultural Geographies 10.3 (2003), 125-148.
Matthew Farish, “Modern Witnesses: Foreign Correspondents, Geopolitical Vision, and the First World War,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26.3 (2001), 273-287.
Other Publications
Matthew Farish, Review Essay on J.R. Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia University Press, 2010), H-Environment Roundtable 1.3 (2011), 9-13.
Matthew Farish and Patrick Vitale, "Locating the American Military-Industrial Complex: An Introduction," Antipode 43.3 (2011), 777-782.
Matthew Farish, “Maps and the State,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Vol. 6, eds. N. Thrift and R. Kitchen (Oxford: Elsevier, 2009), 442-454. (Overview entry, 9485 words)
Matthew Farish, “Military, and Geography,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Vol. 7, eds. N. Thrift and R. Kitchen (Oxford: Elsevier, 2009), 116-121. (Standard entry, 4601 words)
P. Whitney Lackenbauer, Matthew J. Farish, and Jennifer Arthur-Lackenbauer, The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line: A Bibliography and Documentary Research List (Calgary: Arctic Institute of North America, December 2005). (123p.)
TEACHING
I teach courses in historical and cultural geography, as well as the history and philosophy of geography. In the 2011-12 academic year, I will be teaching five courses:
GGR240: Historical Geography of North America (Fall)
GGR360: Culture, History and Landscape (Spring)
GGR421: History and Philosophy of Geography (Fall)
GGR1110: Issues of Geographical Thought and Practice (Fall)
GGR1705: Historical Geographies of Modernity (Spring)
Links
Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto
American Studies Association (ASA)
Association of American
Geographers (AAG)
Canadian Association for
American Studies (CAAS)
Canadian Association of
Geographers (CAG)
Canadian Historical Association
(CHA)
