Geography Department presents: the Donald W. Meinig Undergraduate Lecture

The Donald W. Meinig Undergraduate Lecture honors the pivotal geographical work of Maxwell Professor Emeritus Donald W. Meinig, a member of the Syracuse University Department of Geography from 1959 until his retirement in 2005. John Western, Professor of Geography at Syracuse University, will be the featured speaker and will discuss Places of Value, Trains of Thought. 

Professor Western notes that Professor Meinig, in his last year of undergraduate teaching, complimented a young student that she “had the mind of an explorer” and advised her that “life is an adventure and a journey.”  This address will encourage our graduating geography majors to be explorers with Professor Meinig, and will look at some of his loves: the landscapes of the borders of England and Wales, mapping the traces of culture and history enmeshed therein, and his delight in literature and trains.

From January 2004 until July 2011, Professor Western pursued fieldwork in Strasbourg, France. Two full-length articles, in the Annals AAG and in The Geographical Review, appeared from this research. After completing 162 semi-structured, open-ended interviews there, Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait, was published by Ashgate in the UK and the USA in summer 2012.

Professional travels have taken Professor Western throughout Europe and also to South Africa. Having lived in the latter country in the mid to late 1970s, he returned in the summer of 1996, after a 16-year absence, in order to update his 1981 book, Outcast Cape Town, which documented apartheid's effect upon that city.

Professor Western is a Maxwell Professor of Teaching Excellence as well as the recipient of the University-wide Meredith Teaching Professorship.