David J. Nemeth
Professor
Cultural Geography
Snyder Memorial 3021
419.530.4049
Education
Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles, 1984 – Geography
Diploma United States Defense Language Institute, 1979 – Korean Language
M.A. California State University, Northridge, 1970 – Geography
B.A. California State University, Northridge, 1966 – Political Science
Research Interests
My current researches continue to track from past to future along three broad avenues:
- Cultural/ethnic geography, with emphases on those groups whose occupations and industries are perceived by outsiders as "shadow" (informal or underground) economies; for example, Gypsies (Romanies) and Travelers;
- Asia, with emphases on South Korea and Jeju Island;
- Philosophy and Methodology in Geography, which includes the history of geographic thought and current trends in the academic discipline.
Related to these general paths, I tend to promote the concepts of "enlightened underdevelopment" and "extreme [human] geography" in most of my published researches and in my classroom and online teaching. Many of the MA thesis projects I have supervised explored and elaborated these sorts of topics, concepts and issues. The titles some selected examples are:
"Between Nada and Nietzsche: Geographical Dimensions of Hemingway's 'Clean Well-Lighted Place';" "Geography: Undisciplined by Virtue of Her Relativism;" "My Search for William Bunge;" "Borderlands: A Poetic Hermeneutic on the Cultural Morphology of the Northern Irish Landscape;" "The Covered Staircases of Toledo;" "An Ethnography of the Egyptian Ghawazee;" "Irish Travelers Exposed: A Critique of the Toogood Case;" "Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills: The Architecture of Ideology in a Contested Space;" "Personal Reflections in Berlin's Built Environment: Ideology and Symbolism in the Government District;" "Relativism Within Geography;" "Rix's Bears;" "Secrets Beneath the Soil: A Mixed Methods Necrogeographic Investigation of Romany ("Gypsy") Memorial Sites;" "Tropical Africa and Generation Kalashnikov: the AK47's Role in Shaping an African Identity;" "Where the Sidewalk Ends (and Social Process Begins) : An Evaluation of New Urbanism and a Postmodern Proposal of Social Process Planning;" (and others).
