Join us for the 2023 Gould Memorial Lecture in Geography delivered by Dr. LaToya Eaves, entitled “Uncomfortable Spaces: Placing Black Feminist Geographies in the U.S. South.”

Dr. LaToya Eaves is the Menakka and Essel Bailey '66 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University and Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has been instrumental in increasing the visibility of Black geographies. In addition to her research, which centers questions of race, Blackness, gender, sexualities, and place —especially in terms of the U.S. South and Southeast—Dr. Eaves founded and chaired the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Dr. Eaves teaches us that Black geographies are views on the world; providing a different way to engage geography’s beloved core concepts, such as space, place, and region. Her contributions on the dynamics between questions of non-essentialism and embodiment could not be more timely.

Dr. Eaves’s commitment to diverse experiences and productions of the U.S. South is reflected in her prolific record of publishing in the journal Southeastern Geographer. Dr. Eaves also has publications in Gender, Place, and Culture; Journal of Geography in Higher Education; Dialogues in Human Geography; Geoforum; ACME; and Progress in Human Geography. She is also an editor of four anthologies under contract, including Spatial Futures: Difference and the Post-Anthropocene with Palgrave and Activist Feminist Geographies with Bristol University Press (both due out in 2023). In addition, she is working on two book manuscripts: Unbounded: Notes on Southern Black Feminist Geographies and Something Special: The Place of Queerness in the U.S. South.

The recipient of numerous awards including the Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors for her transformative impact on the AAG through her commitment to Black Geographies, Dr. Eaves also recently received a half million-dollar National Science Foundation grant for a collaborative project on Museums, Public Pedagogy, and Black Geographies in the U.S. Most recently, she was named to the 2023 Class of AAG Fellows. Her profoundly interdisciplinary contributions reflect her experiences, training, and teaching across Africana Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Geography. 

This event is part of the annual Gould Memorial Lecture in Geography at Colgate University. Now in its 17th year, the Gould Lecture was founded to showcase emergent and leading voices in the discipline, highlighting the most pathbreaking work and visionary approaches across human, environmental, and physical geography. It is sponsored by the Department of Geography.