Fred M. Shelley, Chair |
Professors Shelley, Spaeth, Wallach, T. Williams, Yuan; Associate Professors Greene, Hoagland, Offen, Rundstrom, Tarhule; Assistant Professors Purcell, Rashed; Adjunct Professor Kessler; Lecturers Gress, Gros, Tarhule-Lips.
Geography is one of the oldest organized fields of study. Natural curiosity and a desire to seek resources prompted early people to migrate across land and oceans. As knowledge of the world and its people grew, so too did the discipline of geography. The known world was mapped, and cartography developed as a specialized profession highly dependent on mathematics. Continued exploration produced information that was synthesized, and the world was defined and interpreted by geographers.
Modern geography continues to analyze global environments and the role of human life in these systems. The study of the interaction of physical and biological systems with social systems forms a central focus for many geographers. No other scholarly field addresses the interplay between patterns of human activity and the Earth’s climates, landforms, vegetation and soils. In this sense, geography is a field of extraordinary breadth, which attempts to understand connections among the dynamic systems operating on the surface of the Earth.
Modern technologies that allow the collection of geographic information from maneuverable or fixed orbital air and spacecraft provide today’s geographer with holistic perspectives of the Earth at frequent intervals in time. Devices to store and analyze these data have given the geographer means to study a wide array of physical and human phenomena across the entire Earth surface. Geographers examine rhythms in the Earth’s ocean and atmosphere and their impacts on its land surface, land use and cover, and the evolution of physical and cultural patterns on the surface of the Earth.
The department currently works across the broad spectrum of geography. Faculty research interests in physical geography include hydrology, global and tropical climatology, and biogeography. In human geography, faculty research interests include cultural and historical studies focusing on economic and natural resource development, land use, cross-cultural contacts, political geography, and the geography of cyberspace. Active research interests of the faculty in techniques include geographical information systems (GIS), quantitative methods, statistical climatology, and remote sensing. The faculty is involved in research associated with areas of common interest between geography and meteorology, including natural hazards and disasters, water resources, land use and land cover change, and sustainability. Among them, the entire faculty is currently working in many geographical areas, including the United States, Canada, Latin America, Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Middle East, and South and East Asia.
Department offices are housed primarily on the fourth and sixth floors of Sarkeys Energy Center, while laboratories are located on the first floor of the same building. Among those laboratories is a GIS complex which includes PCs, Sun workstations, digitizers, printers, and plotters. Available software includes ERDAS, ARC-INFO, ATLAS/GIS, MAP INFO, and IDRISI. The department also has laboratories for physical geography, cartography, air-photo interpretation, and remote sensing.
University resources include the Bizzell Memorial Library which has an extensive collection of journals and books on geography, a large collection of maps and aerial photographs, and special collections in Western History, the History of Science, and the Geosciences. The Department houses the Center for Spatial Analysis, the Environmental Verification and Analysis Center, and the Oklahoma Alliance for Geographic Education.
The Ralph E. Olson and Margaret Olson Scholarship Fund provides awards to students who have attained high achievement in the field of geography. Undergraduate geography majors are eligible after completion of the junior year. The Clyde Bollinger Award provides awards to graduating seniors who demonstrate outstanding scholarship and enthusiasm for geography. Additional awards and scholarships are provided annually to outstanding graduate and undergraduate students.
All undergraduate students majoring in geography are required to complete a 32-hour core of coursework, which provides students with an introduction to the major areas of geography. Both the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees contain many electives that allows the student (in consultation with the adviser) to craft a degree program that meets their interests in the various facets of geography. Students are encouraged to meet with the departmental faculty adviser early in the student’s academic career to begin discussing the courses best suited to the student’s interests.
For detailed semester by semester curriculum requirements, please consult: checksheets.ou.edu/atmosgeogindex.html.
1. General Education: 40 semester hours distributed in accordance with University requirements.
2. College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences Requirements: 30 semester hours of adviser-approved coursework which must be:
a. outside the student’s major school or department, and which
b. must contain two foreign language courses at the intermediate level, or the student must demonstrate competency (via placement or competency exam) at the intermediate level.
3. Department of Geography Core Requirements: 32 semester hours including Geography 1113 or 2503, 3001, 3023, 3213, 3243, 3924, 3930, one course in Geographic Information Science, two Geography courses as electives and the capstone (4953).
4. Department of Geography Additional Requirements: Seven additional hours of humanities/natural science electives chosen from the approved University-Wide General Education list (Core Areas III or IV). These hours are in additional to those required for 1 and 2 listed above.
5. Electives chosen in consultation with the departmental faculty adviser to complete the 124-126 hours required (including 48 upper-division).
1. General Education: 40 semester hours distributed in accordance with University requirements.
2. College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences Requirements: 46 semester hours including:
3. Department of Geography Core Requirements: 32 semester hours including Geography 1113 or 2503, 3001, 3023, 3213, 3243, 3924, 3930, one course in Geographic Information Science, two Geography courses as electives and the capstone (4953).
4. Department of Geography Additional Requirements: Seven additional hours of humanities/natural science electives chosen from the approved University-Wide General Education list (Core Areas III or IV). These hours are in additional to those required for 1 and 2 listed above.
5. Electives chosen in consultation with the departmental faculty adviser to complete the 124-126 hours required (including 48 upper-division).
A minor in geography requires a minimum of 15 hours of courses acceptable for major credit, including at least nine upper-division hours. In fulfilling the minor requirements, a student must complete two introductory courses from 1103, 1114, or 1213; and an introductory-level techniques course from 3924, 3933, 4133, 4353, or 4453. The remainder of the 15 required hours must come from upper-division graded geography courses selected in consultation with a departmental adviser.
A minor in geotechniques requires a minimum of 15 hours of courses acceptable for major credit, including at least nine upper-division hours. In fulfilling the minor requirements, a student must complete two introductory courses from 1103, 1114, or 1113; and a minimum of nine hours of upper-division courses from 3353, 3924, 3930, 3933, 4133, 4233, 4453, or 4553.
In addition to meeting the requirements of the Graduate College, students seeking admission to the geography program must have an undergraduate grade point average of at least 3.00, be able to define the goals and objectives for their degree program, and submit at least three letters of recommendation. The department encourages the submission of results from the Graduate Record Examination as additional evidence of promise, but they are not required for admission and no minimum score is required. Students who have some deficiencies in their academic background can be admitted conditionally at the discretion of the department. Prospective students are strongly encouraged to contact the Department and to identify and contact prospective advisers before applying for graduate work.
The M.A. degree certifies that a student has a professional grasp of the concepts and techniques of geography and has demonstrated competence and originality in their use. The M.A. degree can be acquired by one of two methods-a thesis option or a non-thesis option.
The thesis option degree requires a total of 30 hours of graduate credit, with at least a B average. Specific coursework requirements include: satisfactory completion of Contemporary Geographical Thought (6973); Research Methods (6953); three three-credit hour research seminars or graduate courses, one field course, and a minimum of four hours and no more than six hours of thesis credit. In addition, the student will:
a. Present a thesis acceptable to the advisory committee.
b. Satisfactorily complete an oral examination.
No student may be examined orally more than once. Only after the advisory committee agrees that the thesis is essentially complete will the oral examination be scheduled.
The non-thesis option requires a total of 36 hours of graduate credit, with at least a B average. Specific coursework requirements include: satisfactory completion of Contemporary Geographical Thought (6973), Research Methods (6953), a field course, three three-credit hour research or graduate courses, and six hours of advisor-approved electives. In addition, the student will satisfactorily complete a comprehensive final examination within his or her chosen field of study.
In order to assure that an M.A. program is completed without undue delay, the evaluation process must be successfully completed before the student has completed more than 42 credit hours of graduate coursework. Courses beyond this total can be counted toward a Ph.D. degree only if the student has completed the M.A. degree or its equivalent.
The Ph.D. degree certifies that a student has mastered a significant body of geographical knowledge and has demonstrated a high degree of professional competence as a geographer by making an important, original contribution to knowledge. The Ph.D. requires:
a. a total of at least 90 semester hours of graduate credit beyond the bachelor’s degree;
b. successful completion of Contemporary Geographical Thought (6973), Research Methods (6953), and three three-credit hour seminars or graduate courses, and one field course;
c. the demonstration of an acceptable level of competence in two areas of specialization;
d. development of a cognate field; and,
e. the completion of an acceptable written dissertation followed by an oral defense of that dissertation.
All Ph.D. students must identify an advisory committee which will consist of the adviser and four other faculty members, one of whom must be from a discipline other than geography. The committee must be approved by the Department faculty, upon the recommendation of the adviser and student.
Each student will develop and declare primary and secondary areas of specialization that are acceptable to the advisory committee. Students are expected to declare provisional specialties, in consultation with the advisory committee, by the end of the second semester of residence in the Ph.D. program. Coursework requirements in connection with this specialty, as well as with the cognate field, are determined by the student and the advisory committee in a formal conference held before the end of the first year of residence.
Each student must select a cognate field or discipline related to his or her area of specialization. A cognate field will normally consist of at least nine hours of courses in more than one discipline. The advisory committee must approve both the cognate field and the courses which fulfill this requirement.
The readiness of a student to proceed with dissertation research will be evaluated by written and oral examinations. These will be administered by an examining committee of at least four faculty members from geography, one of whom will be the student’s adviser, and one faculty member from outside the discipline. The written portion of the examination will cover the degree specializations and cognate field. The examination will be prepared by the adviser from questions suggested by members of the examining committee. The oral examination will consist of follow-up questions related to the written portion and to the student’s knowledge of geographic thought and methodology. Satisfactory completion of the written and oral portions of the general examination is followed by formal certification of candidacy for the Ph.D. degree.
After taking the general examination, a formal dissertation proposal must be presented in a meeting open to the geography faculty and graduate student body. If the proposal is judged to be inappropriate or in need of additional work, a second presentation may be required. It is the responsibility of the adviser to determine the consensus of the committee to authorize the student to proceed with the dissertation. No formal vote of approval shall be required of the faculty as a whole, but the proposal must have the sanction of all members of the dissertation committee.
Before the presentation of the proposal, the following procedure will be employed:
a. the membership of the dissertation committee shall be established,
b. the time and place of the presentation shall be publicized, including a written announcement to the geography faculty, and,
c. a written statement of the proposal shall be given to each member of the dissertation committee and to the remaining members of the faculty.
The final requirement is the preparation and oral defense of a Ph.D. dissertation, which must be a major piece of research recognized by the dissertation committee as a significant contribution to knowledge. The dissertation committee must consist of at least five faculty members (except by petition to and approval by the faculty); three or more of them must be geographers and at least two of them, including the adviser, must be on the geography graduate faculty of the University. Members of the advisory committee will normally remain as members of the examination and dissertation committees. All changes in committee membership must be forwarded to the Graduate College for approval at least 30 days prior to defense of the dissertation.
After advancement to candidacy for the Ph.D. degree, a student is expected to submit a dissertation manuscript within four years. After this time, at the discretion of the Department of Geography faculty, the student may be required to repeat the general examinations and/or to resubmit a dissertation proposal as a condition for remaining a degree candidate. As long as there is clear evidence that a student is making progress and is keeping up-to-date professionally, the four-year time period may be extended on recommendation of the dissertation committee. Experience shows, however, that long delays tend to increase the likelihood of problems in completing a dissertation.
The final defense of the dissertation will be scheduled only after the committee has agreed to approve the draft as nearly complete. Procedures for this defense shall follow those outlined by the Graduate College. Major points of conflict regarding substance or style should be resolved before the final defense. However, minor additions and revisions may be expected after the defense.