Dr. Matthew Farish
Department of Geography
Dr. Matthew Farish
It was the great stories told to him by his professors while he was an undergraduate student that hooked Dr. Matthew Farish. He got seriously interested in geography and went on to complete a bachelor's degree and a doctoral degree at the University of British Columbia. Wanting to then get some exposure outside the discipline of geography, he applied for postdoctoral work at the University of Toronto in the department of history. While there he carried on with his thesis research at the Munk Centre for International Studies, examining how the Cold War was structured geographically and developing a related project on Arctic geopolitics.
"I like to think about history spatially with a geographic eye," he said. "For me, it is a way to study history from an interesting angle that incorporates questions of space, location, landscape and scale. For example, I can look at how imperialism treated questions of space or how the North American continent itself became a cold war space."
Dr. Farish's research into Cold War geopolitics in the United States was recently turned into a book manuscript examining the political geography of the United States during and after the Second World War. Other research interests that he hopes to pursue while at Memorial include a long-term project with a colleague in history at Waterloo on the Distant Early Warning Line, the long radar line that crossed the high arctic from Alaska to Greenland.
He also intends to write another book on American military encounters with the rest of the world in the 20th century using several case studies such as the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq. In this book he plans to examine how geographical conditions are being manufactured and studied for the purpose of military combat.
"Being in Newfoundland, I also hope to study the American military presence in Newfoundland and look at the traces of the military in the environmental, social and cultural landscape."