From CU Geography Grad Student to Professor

In August 2017, I will join the Department of Integrated Science and Technology (ISAT) at James Madison University (JMU) as a tenure-track Assistant Professor with teaching responsibilities in the Geographic Science Program (https://www.jmu.edu/gs/). I was hired specifically as an instructor of human geography. My classroom training and teaching experiences at CU Geography were fundamental to achieving this professional goal. In Fall 2017 and Spring 2018, I will teach established classes and later develop new coursework based on my training at CU, including Political Geography, Critical Development Studies, Geographies of South Asia, and Infrastructure and Geopolitics. I will have the opportunity to design and direct study abroad programs at JMU to several of my research sites in Nepal and the broader  Himalaya region. Because study abroad experiences were tremendously formative to my career development, I am especially excited to bring my own undergraduate students into the field on collaborative research projects in the years ahead.  
 

In addition to my faculty position at JMU, I received a Marie S. Curie Action (MSCA) Individual Fellowship from the European Commission Horizon 2020 program to conduct independent mobility research with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU). I will take a leave of absence from JMU in my second year to pursue this unique opportunity as part of the ERC research group Remoteness and Connectivity: Highland Asia and the World (http://highlandasia.net/index.html). My MSCA research project at LMU Munich, Road Diplomacy: China in South Asia, builds directly upon and expands my dissertation studies at CU Boulder and aims to generate new knowledge about where, why, and to what extent roads are being built between China and South Asia and to untangle the interrelated geopolitical and social impacts of infrastructure development at village, national, and international scales. 

My new professional positions are academic extensions of graduate training at CU Geography and I intend to maintain connections with CU Boulder in the future. No matter the locations or institutions, my applied scholarship will continue to draw on the  theoretical rigor, global perspectives, and classroom orientations gained through critical training in Geography at CU Boulder. In fact, during my hiring interview at JMU, the dean mentioned the prestigious, world-renowned stature of the CU Geography faculty. I believe this gave me a clear advantage during the hiring process. I feel incredibly fortunate to have a tenure track position at this stage of my career and am grateful to all of the CU Geography faculty and staff for the exceptional support along the way. And now I truly understand the old joke that one of the hardest parts of the CU Geography program is leaving Boulder when you’re done!