Faculty Book-Length Publications

The American College Town

by Blake Gumprecht
University of Massachusetts Press, November 2008

Winner of the Association of American Geographers' John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize

“If a friend should ever ask for a book that epitomizes the best that geography can offer, I recommend Blake Gumprecht’s new volume as a near-perfect candidate. He takes a landscape familiar … and makes us see it afresh. He dissects its complexity with astonishing thoroughness, using a rich mix of archival material, personal observation, and field interviews. He offers deep case studies, but remembers the need for broader context. Finally, he assembles the total package with spirited, clean prose, some of the best academic writing I have ever seen.” - James R. Shortridge, Journal of Cultural Geography

“Thoroughly satisfying! Blake Gumprecht has given us a keenly observed, richly documented, many-sided account of a critically significant part of the American scene, one too long ignored by its scholarly residents. A truly brilliant achievement.” – Wilbur Zelinsky, author of The Cultural Geography of the United States

“The American College Town demonstrates Gumprecht's knack for recognizing a great untold story. It also proves that it is actually possible to articulate that most elusive of geographical concepts, the sense of place, when the writer is a master of landscape observation, as Gumprecht unquestionably is. Gumprecht’s exhaustive, multi-dimensional research enables him to read landscapes better than any historical geographer writing today.” --Anne Kelly Knowles, author of Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio s Industrial Frontier

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The Razor’s Edge: International Boundaries and Political Geography: Essays in Honour of Professor Gerald Blake

Edited by Clive Schofield, David Newman, Alasdair Drysdale, and Janet Allison Brown
Kluwer Law International, 2002

excerpt from book cover: Long recognized as the leading authority in the field of political geography with several definitive works to his credit, Gerald Blake has been active since the 1980s as an advisor to governments, business firms, and legal tribunals on boundary delimitation issues. The organization he founded, the International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU) at the University of Durham, has played a major role in resolving numerous boundary issues in the Middle East, East Asia, and Africa, especially through its hands on technical training workshops for government officials charged with negotiating or managing international boundaries.

This festschrift by thirty of his colleagues and former students reflects the topics and regional preoccupations Professor Blake has kept returning to throughout his long career, especially the Middle East, maritime boundaries, and the relation between borders and demographics. Several of the authors extend his work in such areas as Arctic jurisdiction, environmental issues of transboundary water management, and geographic information systems (GIS).