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Dr John Morrissey
| BA (Trinity)
PhD (Exon) PCHE, PDAP, MA (NUI) Lecturer in Political and Cultural Geography Director of the MA in Environment, Society & Development Room: 111, Geography E-mail: john.morrissey  nuigalway.ie
Tel.: +353 (0)91 - 492267 Fax: +353 (0)91 - 495505 |
Biography
John graduated from Trinity with a first class degree in Natural Science, majoring in Geography, in 1996. After travelling for a year, he moved to England in 1997 to pursue his doctorate at the University of Exeter, having been awarded an ESRC scholarship. John's PhD research drew on postcolonial theory to explore the currents of imperialism and resistance in England's first geopolitical imaginary in the early modern period, Ireland. In deconstructing the geographical formulations driving imperial interventions and the emergent forms of colonial governmentality that took root, a key concern lay in examining Gaelic Ireland's long struggle for autoethnography in the face of both material and discursive violence, and in theorising, furthermore, the complicated tactics of subaltern resistance that arose. After completing his PhD, John taught at Exeter for a year before coming to the department in 2001. |
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Government of Ireland IRCHSS Fellow, 2007/2008
John was awarded an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Fellowship for 2007/2008, which he spent as a Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at City University of New York (CUNY). At CUNY, John's research was focused on the evolving geopolitical grand strategy of recent US intervention in the Middle East, with a concern more broadly with the political economy and biopolitics of the war on terror. |
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President's Award for Teaching Excellence, 2011
John was awarded a President's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2011 by the Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at NUI Galway, where he also completed a Masters in Academic Practice in 2012. |
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National Academy for Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning Award, 2012
John was presented with the NAIRTL National Academy Award 2012 by Seán Ó Foghlú, Secretary General of the Department of Education, at a ceremony in Dublin Castle on Sept. 17th. |
Research Interests
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NUI Galway Research Office Profile )
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Selected Publications
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Full List )
Journal Articles and Chapters:
J. Morrissey (2013) 'The Imperial Present: Geography, Imperialism and its Continued Effects', in: N. Johnson, R. Schein & J. Winders (eds) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, pp. 494-507 ( URL ) J. Morrissey, A. Clavin and K. Reilly (2013) 'Field-Based Learning: The Challenge of Practicing Participatory Knowledge', Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Vol. 37 (3), Early View ( DOI ) J. Morrissey (2013) 'Governing the Academic Subject: Foucault, Governmentality and the Performing University', Oxford Review of Education (in press)
J. Morrissey (2012) 'Foucault and the Colonial Subject: Emergent Forms of Colonial Governmentality in Early Modern Ireland', in: P. Duffy & W. Nolan (eds) At the Anvil: Essays in Honour of William J. Smyth, Geography Publications, Dublin, pp. 135-150 ( URL ) J. Morrissey (2012) 'Liberal Lawfare and Biopolitics', in: D. Grondin (ed.) War Beyond the Battlefield, Routledge, London, pp. 28-53 ( URL ) J. Morrissey (2012) 'Podcast Steering of Independent Learning in Higher Education', AISHE-J, Vol. 4 (1): 1-9 ( URL )
J. Morrissey (2011) 'Architects of Empire: The Military-Strategic Studies Complex and the Scripting of US National Security', Antipode, Vol. 43 (2): 435-470 ( DOI ) J. Morrissey (2011) 'Liberal Lawfare and Biopolitics: US Juridical Warfare in the War on Terror', Geopolitics, Vol. 16 (2): 280-305 ( DOI ) J. Morrissey (2011) 'Closing the Neoliberal Gap: Risk and Regulation in the Long War of Securitization', Antipode, Vol. 43 (3): 874-900 ( DOI )
J. Morrissey (2010) 'Imperial Geopolitics', Foreign Policy, May/June ( URL ) J. Morrissey (2009) 'Lessons in American Geopolitik: Kaplan and the Return of Spatial Absolutism', Human Geography, Vol. 2 (2): 36-39 ( URL ) J. Morrissey (2008) 'The Geoeconomic Pivot of the Global War on Terror: US Central Command and the War in Iraq', in D. Ryan & P. Kiely (eds) America and Iraq: Policy-Making, Intervention and Regional Politics, Routledge, New York, pp. 103-122 ( PDF ) J. Morrissey (2006) 'Ireland's Great War: Representation, Public Space and the Place of Dissonant Heritages', Journal of Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, Vol. 58: 98-113 ( URL ) J. Morrissey (2005) 'A Lost Heritage: The Connaught Rangers and Multivocal Irishness', in: M. McCarthy (ed.), Ireland's Heritages: Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 71-87 ( PDF ) J. Morrissey (2004) 'Geography Militant: Resistance and the Essentialisation of Identity in Colonial Ireland', Irish Geography, Vol. 37 (2): 166-176 ( DOI ) |
Research Projects
John worked on this IRCHSS-funded research project in collaboration with the late Prof. Neil Smith at CUNY Graduate Center. The project involved a critical exploration of the role of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) in the military planning, coordination and implementation of US grand strategy in the Middle East. Working through military archives in both Washington DC and New York City, the project entailed a deconstruction of CENTCOM’s geopolitical representations of the Middle East – cartographic and documentary – in the period from 1983 to 2003. In analysing CENTCOM’s archive of geographical knowledges of the Middle East, particular attention was given to interrogating the instrumental geopolitical and cultural power of prevailing Orientalist representations that reify abstracted discourses of difference, threat and western interventionary responsibility.
John worked on this Clinton Institute-funded project with Prof. David Ryan, University College Cork, and Prof. Marilyn Young, New York University. The project involved a critical exploration of how the wars that the United States have participated in since the 1930s have been represented within and beyond US culture, and specifically how they have contributed centrally to American identity. Much previous work has either underplayed the role of war in identity formation or concentrated their analytical scope on a narrow archive of dominant cultural productions within the US. This project examined more disparate archives within the US and also situated work in a post-nationalistic framework. Thus, the complexities of US identity formation were also considered in the wider context of cultural narratives produced beyond the borders from, for example, Europe and the Middle East.
John is working on this CKI-funded project with his colleague in Geography, Dr Kathy Reilly. The project supports field-based learning initiatives on the MA in Environment, Society and Development, which involves students working on the ground with UN agencies, NGOs and various community partners in Bosnia on a range of development issues. Funding is being used to extend civic engagement initiatives there with a view to bridging what has been oft-highlighted in development studies as the disconnect between academic and practitioner work. Collaborative initiatives between the academy, international development practitioners and communities may be rarely embarked upon, but both the pedagogic and community gains in seeking to facilitate more critical, informed and participatory forms of development are considerable and indeed inspiring. |
Research Links
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United Nations Development Programme
UNDP is the UN's global development network, "advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life". John's research has recently connected to UNDP Bosnia; for information on UNDP post-conflict initiatives in Bosnia, please see http://www.undp.ba. |
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Peace One Day The Peace One Day project inspired the establishment of the UN International Day of Peace, a day of global ceasefire and non-violence, now fixed in the calendar as 21 September from 2002. For further details on how you can get involved, please go to http://www.peaceoneday.org. |
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Historical Geography Research Group The Historical Geography Research Group is a study group of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers. For details of research publications, funding opportunities, conferences and other events, please consult http://historicalgeographyresearchgroup.wordpress.com. |
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Exploring Geopolitics
Exploring Geopolitics is an online educational website that seeks to humanise understandings of geopolitics and international relations by fostering dialogue between the academic world, journalists and policy-makers. John was recently the 40th interviewee in its
Geopolitical Scholar Series.
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Graduate Students
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John has had graduate students working on a range of projects spanning issues from colonial mapping and representation to contemporary questions of geopolitics and development. He welcomes further graduate research to the Geopolitics and Justice Research Cluster in Geography, especially in the following areas related to his own research and teaching:
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Masters and Undergraduate Teaching
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TI 703: Geopolitics and Security
TI 706: Field-Based Learning TI 707: MA Dissertation |
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Undergraduate Teaching:
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National University of Ireland, Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland
Tel.: +353 (0)91 49 2643
This page was last updated Tuesday, May 14, 2013