Richard Hunter
Assistant Professor
E-mail Me
Phone: (607) 753-2992
My main research project focuses on the spatial patterns and environmental consequences of land use change in the Valle del Mezquital in central Mexico’s tropical highlands during the Early Colonial period (1520-1620CE). I use this period's land grants to map livestock ranches in a GIS in order to better understand how introduced livestock and agricultural terrace abandonment may have contributed to the region’s severe environmental degradation. A related research question asks how changes in land use/land cover in the Valle del Mezquital increased the region’s ecosystem carbon pool, thereby illuminating the linkages between historical landscape change and late-Holocene climatic anomalies. A developing research agenda focuses on cultural (re)production and consumption in Taiwan's night markets.
Education
PhD, Geography, Louisiana State University, 2009
MS, Geography, South Dakota State University, 2003
BS, Geography, South Dakota State University, 2001
BA, History, South Dakota State University, 2001
Teaching
GRY 120 Cultural Geography (including honors)
GRY 440 Seminar in Geography
GRY 482 Geography of Latin American and the Caribbean
GRY 484 Geography of Europe
INT 380 Secularization (honors)
Publications
(in press). Land use change in New Spain: A three-dimensional historical GIS analysis. The Professional Geographer.
2011. with Andrew Sluyter. How incipient colonies create territory: The textual surveys of New Spain, 1520s-1620s. Journal of Historical Geography 37: 288-299.
2010. Methodologies for reconstructing a pastoral landscape: Land grants in sixteenth-century New Spain. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 43: 1-13.
2009. Positionality, perception, and possibility in Mexico’s Valle del Mezquital. Journal of Latin American Geography 8: 49-69.
