Gerry Kearns
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Professor, Government and International Affairs 112 Architecture Annex |
I come to Virginia Tech, having taught and researched at Liverpool, Madison-WI, and Cambridge. My background is in Geography and I have used its interdisciplinary license to full effect. My PhD at the University of Cambridge (1985) was on nineteenth-century British urban public health reform and I have continued to publish on demography, epidemiology, and public-health ideologies. Today this research is mainly around two themes. In the first place I have been trying to develop an approach to what I call Vital Geographies. This is the geographical study of life, considered in both qualitative and quantitative terms, that is as both longevity and human flourishing. The second theme in my health-related research concerns AIDS and here I am trying to think about the interconnections between cultural critique/performance and epidemiological strategies. I explore three facets of the relations between culture and science in this area: the place of metaphors in epidemiology; the critique of science through art; and the elaboration of new metaphors for science. My research on nineteenth-century public health also led me to both teach and research on the history of cities; as in the collection I edited on Urbanising Britain (with Charles Withers, Cambridge University Press, 1991). My work on cities took up themes relating to the politics of memory and I worked for several years on both Chicago and Paris. My work on Paris appeared in a collection I edited on Selling Places (with Chris Philo, Pergamon, 1993). The third area I work on is in Political Geography. I have been working for quite some time on the relations between geographical ideas and imperialism. In my book on Geopolitics and Empire (Oxford University Press, in press), I look at the similarities in the geographical ideas informing British imperial strategies in the early twentieth century and US imperial strategies today. I also describe an alternative way of viewing the world, that emphasizes the prospects for peace, justice, and cooperation rather than war, conflict and competition. I call this alternative Progressive Geopolitics and I will be further developing this in future research. My work on Political Geography also includes a concern with Irish identities and the history of Irish anticolonial nationalism. I am particularly interested in the different geographical models of identity and I distinguish between nation, diaspora, and cosmopolis as possible frameworks within which people can think about their Irishness. I have been working for some time on the ways that the work of Giorgio Agamben might help me think about the nature of colonial sovereignty and I have published a few papers and book chapters on this. At SPIA and Virginia Tech, I am excited to find colleagues whose work touches upon the themes that have dominated my undergraduate teaching, my postgraduate supervision, and my personal research. I am keen also to broaden my own intellectual agenda in responding to the work I find going on around me. I am particularly keen to draw to Tech any graduate students who might be excited about exploring common research interests in urban studies, geopolitics, or AIDS. |
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Academic Record Curriculum Vitae...
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ResearchMy current research is in four areas: urban studies, geopolitics, Irish Studies, and AIDS. It covers some of the following themes: Urban Studies...
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