Let Geography Die: The Rise, Fall, and “Unfinished Business” of Geography at Harvard

Abstract

This article documents the rise and fall of geography at Harvard University, from the earliest instruction in the seventeenth century to its demise in the mid-twentieth century. Analysis of recently released data from university archives enables deeper understandings than previously written in existing literature, including a focus on the roles of key figures central to the decision to end geography and the prolonged struggle to sustain geography at the college. The article refutes unfounded claims made by key figures to end geography and aims to tell a more nuanced, empirically detailed, queer account of this history. Of central importance to this account is the work of Harvard geography professor Derwent Whittlesey. By providing this more nuanced account, we endeavor to address what a 1951 report at the college identified as the “unfinished business” of geography at Harvard. We discuss an erasure that has long haunted both the discipline of geography and the campus by arguing that the feminization of geographical knowledge and the homophobic feminization of queer geographers at Harvard proved central to the suppression of geographical education and closure of the geography program.