The featured course descriptions listed here are a subset of the 130+ Geography courses listed in the university catalog. Please go to the Registrar website to see "How to Search for Classes" to get the list of courses being offered in the current semester.

Mountain landscape with lake and foreground flowers

GEOG 1001 Environmental Systems 1: Climate and Vegetation

The objective of this course is to provide you with an introduction to the Earth’s climate system and patterns of world vegetation. We will emphasize the many linkages and feedbacks between the non-living (abiotic) and living (biotic) components of the earth system. Topics we will cover include radiation, temperature, winds...

Modern artwork of cross-hatched lines

GEOG 4762 Political Islam

“Political Islam” dominates national and global news with popular revolutions, dictatorships, terrorism, jihad, suicide bombings and beheadings, perpetually in the headlines. The “Muslim World” has become synonymous with war, conflict, crisis and violence. As such “Islam,” particularly after 9-11, has become the definitive ‘Other’ of America, driving both the logics...

Artwork of agriculture with crops, animals, and food

GEOG 4742 Topics in Environment & Society: Geographies of Food and Agriculture

Audrey Richards, the great British anthropologist, once pointed out that the need to eat is the most basic and important of all human drives. We need food more frequently and more urgently than we need sex. The central place of food in our lives has made food one of the...

Painted people in religious celebration

GEOG 4722 / 5722 Field Methods in Human Geography

In this course we will discuss various qualitative methodologies and methods for research in human geography. The readings will provide various techniques and tools for collecting qualitative data. We will discuss the connection between theory and methods and how to critically analyze qualitative research. This course includes a practical engagement...

Collage of water map with water usage statistics, water dam

GEOG 4501 / 5501 Water Resources and Management of the Western U.S.

This course is an overview of the human dimensions of water: the law, policy, economics, management, and valuation of water in the western United States. The West has a completely different legal structure than the East for the administration of water, and a culture that has developed different methods of...

Waterfall in river

GEOG 4311 Watershed Biochemistry

This course is a quantitative investigation of the physical, chemical, and biological processes that determine the hydrology and hydrochemistry of headwater catchments (watersheds). A watershed is a natural unit of land from which the surface, subsurface and groundwater runoff drain to a common outlet. In this course, the emphasis is...

Composite image of flowcharts, computer code, and an old world map

GEOG 4303 / 5303 GIS Programming for Spatial Analysis

Do you want to enter the job market as a competitive GIS modeler with programming skills? This course will help you get there. It focuses on the extension of geographic information systems (GIS) through programming as well as on the development of algorithms for spatial analysis and information extraction in...

Remote sensing image of mountain terrain

GEOG 4110 / 5100 Advanced Remote Sensing

The context, perspective, and scale provided by remote sensing observations have made them an invaluable source of data for understanding the Earth System. In the prerequisite introductory course, Remote Sensing of the Environment (GEOG/GEOL 4093/5093), students learned some of the basic physical principals underlying remote sensing and were introduced to...

View of Earth from international space station. Photo by NASA.

GEOG 4100-001 / 5100-003 Earth Analytics: Accelerating discovery with a view from Space

This course will introduce graduate and undergraduate students to major unanswered questions in Earth science and to the analytical tools necessary to undertake exploration of ‘big data’ from a suite of sensors. This course aligns with Earth Lab , a new initiative of the university’s Grand Challenge efforts to use...

Abstract artwork of planes and mountains in a pattern

GEOG 3742-001 Power, Place, Culture: Biopolitics, War & The State of Exception

Geography in its broadest sense is concerned with understanding the world and our place within it. But this “world” is not simply given; it is fashioned. This course is fundamentally concerned with understanding the process of ‘world-formation’ via a meditation on several abstract and yet essential concepts: Power, Place/Space and...

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