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Dr John Morrissey - director of Ma in env-soc-dev

BA (Trinity College Dublin)
PhD (University of Exeter)
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 technologies 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 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.

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 American intervention
in the Middle East, with a concern more broadly with the political economy and biopolitics of the war on terror.

Ireland's nomination as Fulbright US Institute Scholar, 2010/2011
John was nominated by the Fulbright Commission as Ireland's sole candidate for a Fulbright US Institute Scholar Award for 2010/2011, for the Institute on US Foreign Policy at the University of Florida.

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.

Research Interests

John is a political and cultural geographer, with particular research interests in geopolitics, imperialism and international security. His work also explores broader questions of representation, especially the geopolitical and cultural discursive power of abstracted geographical knowledges. He is the cluster leader of the Geopolitics and Governmentality Research Cluster in Geography at NUIG, a member of the Irish Environmental History Network at Trinity, and a member of the Geographical Sciences Committee and International Affairs Committee of the Royal Irish Academy.

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 evolving grand strategy of United States 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 broader issues of political economy and post-conflict development. He is Director of the MA in Environment, Society and Development.

Securitization
John's work on securitization draws upon the theoretical writings of Michel Foucault, Michael Dillon and others in critiquing the broad array of interventionary practices in our contemporary world that are underpinned by the mobilization of powerful neoliberal discourses of risk, regulation and security.

Representation
John's broad interest in representation is driven by a passion for interrogating the politics and power relations of dominant signifying practices in our modern world. He is interested in the ways in which specific political and cultural geographical knowledges - particularly of conflict and identity - are prioritised, produced and consumed.

Selected Publications

( Full List )

Books:

2012: Key Concepts in Historical Geography, Sage, London
(co-written with David Nally, Ulf Strohmayer and Yvonne Whelan)

2003: Negotiating Colonialism, RGS-IBG Historical Geography Research Series, London

Journal Articles and Chapters:

2011: 'Architects of Empire: The Military-Strategic Studies Complex and the Scripting of US National Security', Antipode, Vol. 43(2): 435-470 ( DOI )

2011: 'Liberal Lawfare and Biopolitics: US Juridical Warfare in the War on Terror', Geopolitics, Vol. 16(2): 280-305 ( DOI )

2010: 'Closing the Neoliberal Gap: Risk and Regulation in the Long War of Securitization', Antipode (early view), Vol. 43(3): 874-900 ( DOI )

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 Students

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

- Geopolitics and securitization

- Interventionism and post-conflict development

- Postcolonialism and resistance

- Identity, memory and place

Current and Recent Graduates:

Stephanie Egan (M.Litt.)
The Operation of Power and Resistance: The Israel-Palestine Conflict and the IPSC

Sharon Leahy (Ph.D.)
The Social Construction of Ethnicity: Exploring Depictions of Ethnic Minorities in Irish Current Affairs Programming

MA and Undergraduate Teaching

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

			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.






			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.






			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 in historical and cultural geography, please consult http://www.hgrg.org.uk.

Department of Geography
National University of Ireland, Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland.
Phone: +353 (0)91 492643
This page was last updated Wednesday, February 01, 2012