Headshot
Professor
Geography • International Affairs

GUGG 201H, 260 UCB

John O'Loughlin, Professor of Geography, College Professor of Distinction and Fellow in the Institute of Behavioral Science, received his Ph.D. in Geography from the Pennsylvania State University in 1973. He is a political geographer especially interested in the spatial and territorial aspects of conflict. He examines both aggregate data collected on the basis of small geographic units as well as individual survey data to understand the motivations of people to engage in violence as well as to measure the effects of violence on people鈥檚 material lives, experiences (especially migration), and attitudes. For the past 30 years, he has worked in the former Soviet Union with Russian colleagues on changing geopolitical orientations, on territorial separatism and its consequences, on de facto states in the Caucasus and Black Sea region, attitudes to Russia across the former Soviet Union, and on the spatial analysis of violent events. In the past decade, he has examined the potential effects of climate change on violence in sub-Saharan Africa.聽 More recent work has concentrated in Kenya using representative national surveys of residents in all ecological zones. He teaches undergraduate classes in Political Geography, Geographies of Global Change, the Post-Soviet Union, and the Social and Political Outcomes of Climate Change, and graduate classes in Political Geography.