Celebrating 100 Years
A Century of Discovery: Celebrating 100 Years of Geography, Environment, and Society
Join us as we honor our past, celebrate our present, and build our future.
This centennial celebration is an opportunity to reconnect with the community that you shaped and that helped shape your understanding of our world. Among other aspirations, we want to mark this special moment by revitalizing our connections to the Geography, Environment & Society community across time and space and find ways for all of you to become more involved in the life of the department. We hope you'll join us to celebrate this remarkable milestone and help us launch the next century of geographic excellence.
The Geography of Environmental Futures
Our theme for this year is The Geography of Environmental Futures. It recognizes our planet is facing unprecedented environmental change. It's a call to examine how we understand, map, and navigate this change from a geographical perspective. This theme goes beyond simply studying landscapes. It delves into the complex interplay between human societies, the natural world, and the array of geographical methodologies that are used to solve these complex interdisciplinary challenges.
Unpacking human-environment interactions in their dazzling complexity, at multiple scales, has long been the sine qua non of the geographical research agenda. Paleoenvironments, climate histories, human-caused changes in landscapes and hydroscapes, biodiversity loss, global water crisis, extreme heat and flood events, air pollution and human health, environmental racism, fossil capitalism, extractive ecologies, climate justice, and democratization of environmental governance are just some of the challenges that have galvanized geographical scholarship in recent years. With the world in flux, rarely have the interdisciplinary insights of the discipline of geography seemed more salient.
In this series, we will be exploring a range of crucial questions: How do social and political systems contribute to environmental problems and solutions? How do physical processes—like climate change, deforestation, and water scarcity—reshape the world around us? And what tools and methods (e.g., GIS, cartography, dendrochronology, ethnography, participatory research, and spatial analysis) can we use to better predict and prepare for these changes? Through our year-long series and events, we aim to uncover how geographical insights can help us shape a more sustainable future.
Centennial Events
To celebrate our centennial and call attention to the planetary challenges we confront, we are hosting a year-long series with speakers focusing on the human-social, biophysical, and methodological perspectives of the topic along with other scholarly and social events.
Fall 2025
Professor and alum Tim Beach (PhD '89) with the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin will be joining us. Learn more about Tim Beach's lecture.
Join us on October 30th as professor and department alum Farhana Sultana (PhD '07) with the Geography and the Environment Department at Syracuse University will be joining us. Read more about Farhana Sultana's lecture.
Join us on November 20th as Janet Franklin with the Department of Geography at San Diego State University will be joining us. Read more about the Borchert Lecture on November 20.
Spring 2026
Rebecca Lave with the Department of Geography at Indiana University-Bloomington will be joining us. Learn more about Rebecca Lave's lecture.
Shaowen Wang with the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will be joining us. Learn more about Shaowen Wang's lecture.
Alan Law with the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Stirling will be joining us. Learn more about Alan Law's lecture.
This year's presenter is Holly Buck with the Department of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo. Learn more about the Brown Day Celebration.
Centennial Campaign
Over the past 100 years, the Department of Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota (formerly the Department of Geography)—one of the oldest in the country—has built a world-class reputation in faculty excellence, cutting edge research and scholarship, outstanding graduate and undergraduate education, and service to the profession of geography. The department can point to our constant excellent national and international rankings where, in the 1980s, geography at Minnesota was number one.
Our faculty have been selected as national leaders (four having served as president of the American Association of Geographers and one as president of the University Consortium for Geographic Science), University of Minnesota Regents' Professors, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Our graduate students have been placed in the leading geography departments, both nationally and globally. Additionally, seven PhD alumni from our department have served as president of the AAG.
The Centennial Award celebrates the department's 100 years of leadership in the discipline and will support both graduate student fellowships and undergraduate scholarships as well as faculty and department creative activity (e.g., event support, community-engaged research and/or experiential, field-based pedagogy).
Given the current financial challenges in higher education with budget reductions, competitive salaries and startup package costs, and shrinking resources for graduate student funding and undergraduate scholarships, attracting talented faculty and students requires substantial resources to remain a top-ranked department. The Centennial Award will provide the department with critical flexible funds that can be distributed to those most in need of support.
Stay Connected
As part of our celebration, we'd like to invite you to help us put together a story map that shows who we are as a department by mapping where our alumni have ended up and the kinds of work they have done.
This mapping endeavor will serve two key purposes: visualizing the diversity of our graduates' professional lives and helping communicate the power of geography to current and prospective students. The more responses we have, the more powerful our map will be, so we'd like to invite all of you to participate by sharing your story through a brief profile.
Questions? Contact Ivan Bialostosky, senior academic advisor of undergraduate studies and alum of our PhD program, at [email protected]. It would be great to reconnect and hear how geography has shaped your journey.