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Dr John Morrissey

B.A. (Trinity College Dublin)
Ph.D. (University of Exeter)

Lecturer in Human Geography
Director of the MA in Environment, Society and Development

Room 111, Geography Department

E-mail: john.morrisseynuigalway.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 begin his PhD at the University of Exeter, having been awarded an ESRC scholarship. His PhD research in historical geography focused on the political and cultural geographic dimensions of colonialism and resistance in early modern Ireland, and presented a postcolonial critique of contemporary English colonial discourse and practice. After completing his PhD, John taught at Exeter for a year before coming to the department in 2001.

John was awarded a Government of Ireland IRCHSS Fellowship for the academic year 2007/2008, which he spent as a Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate School of City University of New York. At CUNY, John's research was focused on the evolving geopolitical grand strategy of recent American intervention in the Middle East, with a concern more broadly with the political economy and biopolitics of the so-called war on terror.

Research Interests

John is a political and cultural geographer, with particular research interests in geopolitics, imperialism, political economy and identity. His work also explores broader questions of representation and the political and cultural use of geographical knowledges.

3 key areas of research are:

Geopolitics
John's current research is focused on US geopolitics in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the military strategy of US Central Command. In addition, he is working on a Clinton Institute-funded interdisciplinary project entitled 'War and American Identity' with David Ryan at UCC and Marilyn Young at NYU. John's work in geopolitics also speaks to issues of political economy, environmental security and development. He is Director of the MA in Environment, Society and Development.

Identity
John's interest in identity lies in theorising how cultural belonging has been variously constructed and contested in the contexts of colonialism and nationalism. His research engages especially how identity is spatially structured and discursively configured around key axes such as race, ethnicity, gender and the nation-state.

Representation
John's work on representation is driven by a passion for interrogating the politics and power relations of dominant signifying practices in the contemporary world. He is interested in the ways in which specific geographical knowledges - particularly of war, landscape and identity - are prioritised, produced and consumed.

Sample Publications

( Full List )

Books:

2010: (with Ulf Strohmayer, Yvonne Whelan and Brenda Yeoh): Key Concepts in Historical Geography,
Sage, London ( Book Details )

2003: Negotiating Colonialism, HGRG, Royal Geographical Society, London ( Book Details )

Journal Articles and Chapters:

2010: 'Closing the Neoliberal Gap: Risk and Regulation in the Long War of Securitization', Antipode, Vol. 42 (in press)

2010: 'Bases, Bodies and Biopolitics: US Juridical Warfare in the War on Terror', Geopolitics, Vol. 15 (in press)

2010: 'Architects of Empire: The Military-Strategic Studies Complex and the Scripting of US National Security', Antipode, Vol. 42 (in press)

2009: 'Lessons in American Geopolitik: Kaplan and the Return of Spatial Absolutism', Human Geography, Vol. 2(2): 36-39 ( URL )

2009: 'Imperial Geopolitics', Foreign Policy, May/June ( URL )

2008: 'The Geoeconomic Pivot of the Global War on Terror: US Central Command and the War in Iraq', in D. Ryan and P. Kiely (eds) America and Iraq: Policy-Making, Intervention and Regional Politics, Routledge, New York, pp. 103-122 ( PDF )

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 ( PDF )

2005: 'A Lost Heritage: The Connaught Rangers and Multivocal Irishness', in: McCarthy, M. (ed.), Ireland's Heritages: Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 71-87 ( PDF )

2005: 'Cultural Geographies of the Contact Zone: Gaels, Galls and Overlapping Territories in Late Medieval Ireland', Social and Cultural Geography, Vol. 6(4): 551-566 ( DOI )

2004: 'Geography Militant: Resistance and the Essentialisation of Identity in Colonial Ireland', Irish Geography, Vol. 37(2): 166-176 ( DOI )

Graduate Supervision

John has had graduate students working on projects exploring issues ranging from colonial mapping and representation to contemporary questions of race, identity and performance. He welcomes further graduate research, especially in the following areas related to his own research and teaching:

- Critical geopolitics and the political economy of war
- Imaginative geographies and representation
- Colonial and postcolonial geographies
- Identity, memory and public space

Current Graduates:

Stephanie Egan (Ph.D. Candidate)
The Irish-Palestinian Solidarity Campaign: Geographies of Resistance and Networks of Knowledge

Sharon Leahy (Ph.D. Candidate)
Presenting a New Ireland: The Production of Multi-Ethnic Discourses in Irish Current Affairs Programming

MA and Undergraduate Teaching

   TI 702: Geography and Geographing

   TI 703: Geopolitics and Security

   TI 706: Field-Based Learning

   TI 707: MA Dissertation

Undergraduate Teaching:

TI 355: Research Seminar in Historical and Cultural Geography

TI 326: War and Representation

TI 229: Political and Cultural Geography

Research Links

Historical Geography Research Group

The Historical Geography Research Group (HGRG) is a study group of the RGS-IBG. For details of contacts, funding opportunities, conferences and other events in historical and cultural geography, see http://www.ex.ac.uk/cornwall/geography/HGRG.

   Peace One Day
   21 September

'A Call to Action': The Peace One Day project inspired the establishment of the United Nations 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.

Department of Geography
National University of Ireland, Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland.
Phone: +353 (0)91 492643
This page was last updated Friday, February 05, 2010