Greetings From the Chair

Welcome to the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT-Austin. At over 75 years old, ours is among the top fifteen PhD-granting geography departments in the country. Our faculty are internationally recognized leaders in geography and cognate disciplines, including editors of leading journals and office-holders in academic associations. They maintain active research agendas in areas of human-environment interactions, land change and land system science, conservation and sustainable development, remote sensing, GIScience, GeoAI and spatial data science, remote sensing and lidar, globalization, environmental justice, feminist geography, biodiversity conservation, paleoenvironments and geoarchaeology, sustainable tourism, food security, natural hazards and disasters, soils, sediment budgets, water quality, ecology, watersheds and hydrology, geomorphology, environmental policy and ethics, carceral geographies, race and indigeneity, militarism, migration, youth geographies, capitalist restructuring, environmental psychology, and environmental perception, among other specialties. Our regional expertise includes Latin America, Africa, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Near East, Europe, and the United States.  

Our graduate program prepares students for highly competitive positions in higher education, government administration, the private sector and nonprofit organizations. Our graduate students benefit from our strong interdisciplinary ties to other units on the UT-Austin campus, including the Jackson School of Geosciences, the College of Natural Sciences, the School of Architecture, the LBJ School of Public Policy, and many other departments, institutes and centers in the College of Liberal Arts. Graduate students all receive financial support of one sort or another during their time at UT, while acquiring hands-on experience teaching and working in our various research laboratories.

We also benefit from our location in Austin, one of the main hubs for arts, culture, and creative industries in Texas. Austin is the home of South by Southwest festival and Austin City Limits festival, which attract talent and creativity from around the world. Bordered on the west by the Texas Hill Country, we are within driving distance of numerous state parks and protected areas with fantastic opportunities for hiking, swimming, fishing and camping, such as Enchanted Rock, Lost Maples, Pedernales Falls, Inks Lake, Riemer Ranch, Hamilton Pool, and Guadalupe River. Winters are generally sunny and snow-free, with average low temperatures above 40 degrees and highs around 60 degrees.

For a sample of recent scholarly activity, visit our research page, and to see current events in the department check out our events page. A list of faculty can be found here, and our graduate students are listed here.