News

AAG Welcomes New Editor of AAG Review of Books, Thanks Outgoing Editor

June 30, 2020

The AAG is pleased to announce Debbie Hopkins as the new editor of the AAG Review of Books. The AAG sincerely thanks founding editor Kent Mathewson, whose vision and ideas have shaped the AAG Review of Books since its beginnings eight years ago. Hopkins will take the helm when Mathewson steps down on July 1.

As the new editor of The AAG Review of Books, Debbie Hopkins brings a background in research, teaching, writing, and editing on transport and mobilities, sustainable urban development, low carbon transitions, and mobile labor. She is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford, UK, jointly appointed between the School of Geography and the Environment, and the Sustainable Urban Development (Department of Continuing Education) program. She completed her master’s degree (Geography, with distinction) at King’s College London in 2010, PhD at the University of Otago (New Zealand) in December 2013, and postdoctoral training at the Centre for Sustainability (Otago, New Zealand, 2014-2016), and the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford (2016-2017).

In addition to her responsibilities at the AAG Review of Books, Hopkins is the Associate Editor (Transport and Mobilities) of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Transport Geography. She has also been part of several large research centres and grant applications, including the Energy Cultures project (2013-2016, Otago), the Centre for Innovation and Energy Demand (2016-2018, Sussex, Manchester and Oxford), and the Centre for Research on Energy Demand Solutions (2019-2022, multi-institutional). In addition to this, she leads research on low-carbon transitions, labor and mobilities, largely in relation to freight/trucking and waste. She has co-edited two books: Low Carbon Mobility Transitions (GoodFellow Publishers, 2016) and Transitions in Energy Efficiency and Dema

nd (Routledge (Open Access), 2018).

Kent Mathewson is former Fred B. Kniffen Professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University. Mathewson helped start the AAG Review of Books in 2012, and has also been a book review editor for other publications such as the Annals of the AAG, Historical Geography, and Geographical Review for the past 25 years. His founding of the AAG Review of Books is rooted in his conviction that the books geographers publish are the discipline’s face to the world and offer a guide to measure progress in the discipline. AAG wishes him well and reiterates our thanks as he steps into retirement from both LSU and the AAG Review of Books.

Published quarterly, the AAG Review of Books is a special journal highlighting recent texts in geography and related disciplines. The journal features book reviews by geographers and other scholars at various points of their academic careers. We look forward to working with Dr. Hopkins.

Journals

‘The Professional Geographer’: COVID-19 Announcement

March 27, 2020

To the authors, readers, reviewers, and staff members who contribute their energy and insight to The Professional Geographer,

I am grateful to this community of scholars and practitioners, whose contributions to The Professional Geographer have helped maintain its high quality and excellent reputation. Your dedication to scholarship and reflections on practice have put The Professional Geographer in a strong position to weather the unprecedented challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Right now, all of us are experiencing intense personal and professional demands. As teachers and professionals, we must move our work online, with increasing requests of our students and colleagues. As parents and caregivers of family and friends, and as individuals, we are called upon to cope with change, uncertainty, economic stress, and threats to our own and loved ones’ health.

In recognition of these realities, and to respond to our community’s needs, The Professional Geographer will adjust its customary timetables for submissions and reviews to accommodate everyone who will need extra time this year because of increased professional and personal obligations. Our team will make every effort possible to move the editorial process along smoothly, working within the realistic timeframes needed by each person we work with, as the need arises. For example, we may need to extend the review period for a submitted paper, or give an author extra time to make revisions. Editorial decisions, which rely on voluntary peer-reviews, may be prolonged as a result.

In short, we expect to slow down the production process in the coming months, to help our contributors and staff rise to the unexpected challenges of this global public health crisis. Production of The Professional Geographer will not stop, however. Perhaps now more than ever, our discipline needs the excellent scholarship and professional reflections the journal provides on how and with what tools we learn about the world and work to solve its problems.

As the editor of a journal that has evolved over 70 years to fulfill this mission, I am confident that even this challenge will lead us to become more robust, once we get through this tunnel. I look forward to working with you. Together we will endure this challenging moment. I ask for your patience and resilience, and thank you for your support of our community.

Editor, The Professional Geographer

Heejun Chang

News

‘The AAG Review of Books’: COVID-19 Announcement

March 27, 2020

It has been my pleasure to serve as Editor in Chief for the AAG Review of Books for eight years. As I work on the transition to a new incoming editor, to prepare for the rest of 2020, we have been served up with an unexpected challenge, in the form of the COVID-19 crisis.

The publishing industry is already reacting to this public health emergency, moving back publication dates and slowing editorial schedules. A ripple effect in timelines and publication dates for the Review is inevitable. Coupled with this reality, we also need to be responsive to the personal and professional needs of our reviewers and staff, as they manage unanticipated family and professional obligations at this difficult time.

Accordingly, we expect to slow down the pipeline of new book reviews during this first part of 2020, which will affect our timetables for the next several issues.

Please rest assured that we will continue to work toward providing timely, well-considered reviews of the most current books concerning geography, geospatial public policy, and global geopolitical issues. We expect that the timing of our work will be influenced by these significant external forces at work in all of our lives and the publishing industry this spring.

I greatly appreciate your patience and understanding during the coming months. Thank you for your contributions to the journal, your contributions to the field, and your readership.

Editor, the AAG Review of Books

Kent Mathewson

News

‘Annals of the AAG’: COVID-19 Announcement

March 24, 2020

The Long View

When the Annals was launched in 1911, penicillin did not yet exist. As Editors, we are taking the long view on the COVID-19 pandemic. While the journal has persevered through many global crises, the present moment is clearly not business as usual.

We recognize these are exceptional times that are creating unusual burdens for individuals and communities. Many people are taking on additional duties as they cope with self-isolation and social distancing; cancelled classes, school and childcare; caring for and assisting older people and those with underlying health conditions; and the very real needs of students, staff and colleagues in our institutions. Those with caring responsibilities are facing more demands on their time, not fewer. These caring responsibilities are diverse and include friends, neighbors, colleagues and students—not just family members or dependent children.

We have chosen not to suspend our journal activities or operations for a set period, given the uncertain duration of this crisis. Instead, we are slowing things down, in order to stay nimble and responsive to differential challenges, capacities, and needs of our staff, contributors, and community members. Editorial decisions and copy-editing will be slower than usual; the window of reviewing will be extended and adapted to personal circumstances; responses and communications may be uneven or delayed. The months ahead will test all of us in different ways. Through difficult times, we ask for your patience.

Most important, we ask that our readers put care and community first. Peer review and academic publishing is, at its core, an act of goodwill—it requires sustained, thoughtful engagement with others, a kind of relation-building. We fully recognize and respect that not all members of our community are in a position to submit or review papers at this time. If you are able to engage in peer review, we will work with you to fully take account of your circumstances.

In the months to come, we expect to see trials and tests like never before, requiring us to pull together as a community. In this community, we find strength and hope. Reflecting on the recent words of Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach, we take some inspiration: “in the years to come, let them say of us: when things were at their worst, we were at our best.”

Editors, Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Ling Bian, David R. Butler, Katie Meehan, Kendra Strauss

Journals

‘GeoHumanities’: COVID-19 Announcement

March 24, 2020

Not Business as Usual: A Message from the Editors of GeoHumanities

There is little about being an academic in the current time that can be called “business as usual”. Academic publishing is no exception. It is the joint act of many people – authors, reviewers, readers, people in the offices of publishers and professional societies such as the AAG, editors, and many others. All of us live in communities that have been, and increasingly will be, shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We join with our fellow AAG editors in choosing not to suspend our journals’ activities or operations for a set period, given the uncertain duration of this crisis. Instead, we are slowing things down, to allow more space and time for listening to the different challenges, capacities, and needs of our staff, contributors, and community members. Editorial decisions and copy-editing will be slower than usual; the window of reviewing will be extended and adapted to personal circumstances; and responses and communications may be uneven or delayed. The months ahead will test all of us in different ways. Through difficult times, we ask for your patience.

Alongside our fellow AAG editors, we ask that all of us who contribute to the existence of our journals put care of self and others first. Submission of papers and peer review are, we believe, at their core, a means of building, maintaining and sharing an academic community. They require sustained, thoughtful engagement with others – a relation-building founded on trust, generosity and empathy as well as rigour, honesty and accountability. This engagement takes many forms, works to different tempos, and is itself immersed in a world of cares and responsibilities. For many of us, ‘not business as usual’ means taking time to simply care for others and ourselves; for others, it means slowly taking stock of events, and reserving our voice until a time when we feel a contribution is feasible and useful. As such, we urge critical conversations on the links that have been, and continue to be, drawn between academic publishing, productivity, and career progression within academia. Universities and the apparatus that surrounds them can, and will, frame articles as measures of academic ‘belonging’ and ‘success’, reducing the work involved to metrics, and arguably glossing the many values that scholarship can provide to both the individuals undertaking it and their potential audiences. This framing can also erase or ignore other sites where other practices are cherished and valued – including caring for ourselves and others – practices that are especially important during times of crisis.

Please take good care.

Editors, GeoHumanities

Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon

Journals

AAG Announces New Annals Editors, Thanks Leaving Editors

December 17, 2019

The AAG welcomes two new editors to take the positions of the Human Geography and Nature & Society editorships for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Kendra Strauss of Simon Fraser University will be taking over for Human Geography Editor Nik Heynen while Katie Meehan of King’s College London will assume the role of the Nature & Society Editor as James McCarthy’s term ends. The AAG sincerely thanks Nik Heynen and James McCarthy for their four years of exemplary service in these positions.

Kendra Strauss is both an Associate Professor and Director of the Labour Studies Program and The SFU Morgan Centre for Labour Research as well as an Associate Member of the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University. Before taking on her current position, Strauss was an Urban Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow and then held a permanent lectureship in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge from 2012 to 2014. Her focus as a geographer and feminist political economist revolves around labor politics, the definition of work, the regulation of labor markets, and geographical imaginations of environmental change. Strauss brings to the Annals a background in editing as the co-editor of two books, Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction and Temporary work, agencies, and unfree labour: Insecurity in the new world of work. She has also served on the editorial boards of six journals in geography, labor studies, and political economy.

A human-environment geographer and water policy specialist by training, Katie Meehan is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at King’s College London and the lead PI of the Plumbing Poverty project. Prior to King’s, she was Assistant and then Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon, from 2010 to 2019. Her expertise includes urban political ecology, infrastructure and social inequality, water insecurity and development, science and technology studies, climate change adaptation, and the politics of environmental knowledge at the science-policy interface. Meehan is a mixed methodologist, combining data from diverse sources such as ethnography, household surveys, Q method, and census data. Her research has appeared in journals such as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Science, Geoforum, Environment and Planning D, Water International, Environmental Science and Policy, and WIREs Climate Change. Meehan is on the leadership team of the NSF-sponsored Household Water Insecurity Experiences Network.

The AAG would like to express its appreciation for the work of Nik Heynen as the past Human Geography Editor for the Annals. Heynen, a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia, contributed his valuable experience as past Editor of Antipode and founding editor of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Book Series to the AAG, ensuring the Annals remained a journal held in high regard by the Geography community.

A sincere thank you to James McCarthy as he leaves his post as the Nature & Society Editor for the Annals. A Professor of Geography at Clark University, McCarthy edited the most recent Special Issue of the Annals on Environmental Governance in a Populist/Authoritarian Era, which is now available as a stand-alone edited volume from Routledge. As the Nature & Society Editor since January 2016, McCarthy’s dedication has continued the tradition of publishing research of high quality and rigor expected from the AAG.

Strauss and Meehan will begin their service in these roles on January 1, 2020.

Annals, Annals of the AAG, editors, Journal editors, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Journals

‘The Professional Geographer’ Welcomes New Editor

July 1, 2019

This summer, the AAG journal The Professional Geographer will see a change in editorial leadership. Barney Warf has completed two terms as editor of The Professional Geographer and is succeeded by Heejun Chang, who assumed editorship of the journal on July 1, 2019.

Heejun Chang is a professor and outgoing chair of the department of geography at Portland State University. His publication record is extensive having published 131 peer-reviewed articles on topics related to hydrology, water resources, human modification of the environment, and environmental change, his areas of expertise. Heejun has experience with publication in a wide variety of journals, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and is regarded as a high quality peer reviewer, an accolade for which he received an excellent reviewer award from Journal of Hydrology. He has also served as guest editor for special issues of Climate and International Journal of Geo-Information.

Heejun’s vision for his term as editor of The Professional Geographer is one of diversity, inclusion, and innovation. He sees the journal as a premier location for bridging traditional divides among human, physical, and GIS scholarship and hopes to foster a balance in submissions from the various facets of the geographic discipline. Heejun believes that encouraging more cross-generational scholarship as well as manuscripts co-authored with practitioners will help to cultivate fresh ideas within the discipline and that The Professional Geographer can play a key role in circulating these debates. Lastly, as the AAG has become more international in its membership, Heejun welcomes scholarship from the global geography community including academics from the global south or whose primary language is not English.

The AAG would like to express their heartfelt thanks to Barney Warf for his hard work over the last eight and a half years. Under Barney’s editorship scholarship published in The Professional Geographer maintained high quality and rigor while engaging academics and practitioners worldwide.

The Professional Geographer, published four times a year, features a range in content and approach from rigorously analytic to broadly philosophical or prescriptive. The journal provides a forum for new ideas and alternative viewpoints.

Journals

Meet the AAG Journals Editors – James McCarthy and Ling Bian

September 24, 2018

James McCarthy is the Nature and Society editor for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and a Professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. His work analyzes the interactions of political economy and environmental politics, with particular emphases on rural areas, renewable energy, property relations, and social movements. He has published widely on these themes in geography and related disciplines, including two major edited volumes and over 50 articles and chapters. He has carried out research on natural resource management, energy policy, and connections between rural landscapes and livelihoods for the Ford Foundation and Oxfam America. Prior to coming to Clark in 2011, he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Geography at Penn State University. His current research focuses on the relationships among climate change, renewable energy, and the political economy of capitalism, focusing in particular on the ways in which a renewable energy sector booming in the context of climate change is taking up land and other natural resources in ways that may slow further climate change on the one hand, but create new social and environmental claims, impacts, and conflicts on the other.

Professor McCarthy considers nature-society research and analysis to be an absolutely essential area of scholarship for geography and for society. The field’s breadth, relevance, and potential for integration of diverse topics and approaches is precisely what led him to a career in academic geography after work in the environmental NGO field, and those attributes make creative and committed new work in it needed now more than ever. As editor, Professor McCarthy seeks to ensure that the full range of current nature-society scholarship in geography is represented in the Annals. He enjoys seeing both the tremendous range and vibrancy of work in the field, and working developmentally with scholars early relatively new to the publication process. Professor McCarthy sees cultivating new voices, perspectives, and topics in the discipline and journal as essential responsibilities for an editor, and prospective authors should always feel free to contact him regarding potential topics for the journal.

Ling Bian is the newest of the four editors for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, having assumed her role in January 2018. She currently serves as the editor for the Geographic Methods section of the Annals. Published six times a year (January, March, May, July, September and November), the Annals also dedicates one Special Issue per year which draws a diversity of papers from across the discipline under a single theme.

In addition to being an editor, Bian is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo where she teaches geographic information systems and sciences, remote sensing, network analysis, and geostatistics. Her research interests are in the general area of geographic information science, but she has decades of publication experience in topics related to GIScience, remote sensing, and geographic image retrieval. In recent years she has focused on the ontological foundation of spatial representation, individual-based and spatially explicit behavior modeling, network analytics, and their implementations in the context of public health.

Bian currently serves on the editorial board of the Annals and has previously served on the editorial board of The Professional Geographer and as Associate Editor of ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Bian is the Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at Buffalo, which was formed in 1988, to promote excellence in GIScience research. Even though she is the methods editor, Bian believes that those wishing to publish their research in geography today should try to pay attention to more than the methods themselves. Scholars should look to tell a story with their research and strive to see the social relevance of their work.

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Meet the AAG Journals Editors – Deborah Dixon, Tim Cresswell, and Philip J. Nicholson

August 28, 2018

There are two editors who work on the AAG Journal, GeoHumanities as well as an assistant editor. Deborah Dixon is one of the editors who works to publish new scholarly interactions occurring at the intersections of geography and multiple humanities disciplines within the journal.

Deborah Dixon is a cultural and political geographer, with an undergraduate degree from Cambridge; a Masters from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a thesis on cholera in British India; and a PhD from the University of Kentucky with a thesis on the political reanimation of regions. Her first job was at East Carolina University where she researched the rural geographies of marginal economies and the experience of migrant women, before she returned to the UK to work at Aberystwyth University and then the University of Glasgow. She has four books and over 80 articles, and is currently working on a project on ‘Earth Futures’ that looks at the making of the Anthropocene and anticipated futures though geoengineering and the shifting geographies of radionuclides.

In her own words, Dixon explains what she enjoys most about being an editor for AAG Journals:

“GeoHumanities is a very young journal, and I have been fortunate to be able to develop its ethos, remit and its aesthetics. What I enjoy most is seeing a collection of articles come together with pieces in the ‘Practices and Curations’ section of the journal to give a collective sense of what this field indeed is, what is lays claim to, and how it looks to be developing. I enjoy working with the individual submissions, but it is this collective presentation within the covers of an issue, with its substantive range and epistemic diversity, that really gives me a sense of having contributed something that is worthwhile. What I hope is that readers will go through the entire issue, or, if they are looking up a particular article, feel their eye drawn to something else, and something else again.”

Tim Cresswell is one of the AAG Journals editors for ‘GeoHumanities,’ the newest journal in AAG’s suite of journals. Published twice a year, ‘GeoHumanities’ features both academic articles as well as shorter creative pieces that cross over between the academy and creative practice.

In addition to being an editor, Cresswell is Dean of the Faculty and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut, where he is also Professor of American Studies. He is the author or editor of nine books on the role of space, place, and mobility in social and cultural life including Place: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2014). He has Ph.D.s in geography from University of Wisconsin – Madison and creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. Currently, Cresswell is working on books on the representation of mobility in the photography of Eadweard Muybridge, the role of place in contemporary poetry, and the history of Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Cresswell is also a widely published poet with two collections, most recently Fence (Penned in the Margins, 2015).

Being an editor for the AAG Journals brings Cresswell satisfaction, particularly in guiding “creative and bold writers and scholars from across disciplines towards finding a readership and making a mark,” especially with younger scholars. For him, prospective authors should “be bold. Allow the discipline to inspire you, but don’t let it limit you,” and while he definitely thinks that the intersection of geography and the humanities should be at the forefront of geographic thought, he believes that the meeting of “creative geographies” with the digital needs the most attention. Such work, “can address key issues such as life in the Anthropocene, the ethical implications of Big Data, and the hopeful possibilities of inhabiting the earth despite of and across our differences.”

Philip J. Nicholson is the editorial assistant of GeoHumanities, an honorary researcher in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, and a practicing artist. In his role as editorial assistant, Nicholson created and currently maintains the GeoHumanities online exhibition. Here, some of the artists and arts-practicing geographers whose work has been published in GeoHumanities are featured.

As an undergraduate, Nicholson studied Contemporary Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University where he concentrated on sculpture and installation. Following this, he moved to London to study for an MA in Creative Practice for Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. This was very much an interdisciplinary course, which gave him the opportunity to collaborate with other creative professionals to tell stories in physical and digital spaces. Nicholson’s training as an artist and designer is very much at the heart of his practice as a geographer.

In June he was awarded his PhD in Human Geography from the University of Glasgow. The remit of his PhD project was to explore the creative potential of geographic information systems (GIS) from an arts and humanities perspective. To do this, he developed a methodology that supplemented traditional qualitative methods with creative practice via modes of experimentation, performance, and video making.

Recently, Nicholson has been given the opportunity to work as a postdoctoral research assistant on a set of inter-linked, cross-disciplinary and cross-border projects to develop ‘creative geovisualisation’ as a method of working collaboratively and creatively to map social and physical data sets, but also to map the messy work of knowledge production itself.

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Meet the AAG Journals Editors: Kent Mathewson and Robert Perham

August 3, 2018

Kent Mathewson is the editor-in-chief of the AAG Review of Books. Published quarterly, the AAG Review of Books is a special journal highlighting recent texts in geography and related disciplines. The journal features book reviews by geographers and other scholars at various points of their academic careers. These reviews are also available from a database located on the AAG website.

Mathewson has lived in a number places in the U.S. Originally from North Carolina and Virginia, he has also lived in the Northwest, Midwest, Northeast, and then back to the South again. He studied geography at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio for his bachelor’s degree and University of Wisconsin, Madison for his graduate degrees. He is currently Fred B. Kniffen Professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University. Previously he taught geography at a number of campuses in Wisconsin, as well as in Minnesota, Virginia, North Carolina and Ecuador. His travel experience matches his residential life. He has traveled extensively in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Australia. Courses that he teaches at LSU reflect his geographic travel, focusing on geographies of the Americas and Europe as well as cultural geography and history of geography.

Over the course of his career, Mathewson’s contributions to the geographic discipline include serving as a book review editor. He helped start the AAG Review of Books six years ago and has been a book review editor for other publications such as Historical Geography, Geographical Review, and Cultural Ecology Newsletter for the past 25 years. He enjoys the opportunity through his editorial work to meet many colleagues in geography and related disciplines as well as be at the forefront of surveying recent trends in disciplinary research. As a book reviews editor, Mathewson believes he is in “a privileged position not only for the responsibilities conferred, but also in a vantage point for viewing the shifting research trends in the discipline.” He believes in the importance of understanding the progression of the geographic discipline as reflected in the books geographers publish. For those hoping to publish in geography he offers the following advice: “In writing, strive for short and clear declarative sentences. Use jargon sparingly if at all. Write for a readership well beyond the narrow bounds of your specialty.”

Several graduate students are also a part of the AAG Journals’ editorial team, including Robert Perham who worked as an assistant for the AAG Review of Books. In his own words below, Perham talks about what led him to this position and his experiences working with the AAG publications team.

Hi, I’m Robert Perham. I grew up in Rusper, a small village in the South of England. I recently finished master’s degree in geography at Louisiana State University. I found myself in Baton Rouge by way of a road trip I took across the “deep South,” in 2013! Did I get lost and just decide to stay there, you ask? Kind of, after studying abroad at Rutgers University, NJ, during my undergrad at the University of Manchester, U.K., the road trip provoked my research interests in the U.S. South (particularly Southern identity and Confederate iconography). What better way to fulfil these interests and further my education in geography than pursuing a master’s in Louisiana, I thought. Also, I’d only be just over an hour from New Orleans; a city that as a geographer I find fascinating on so many levels, which is probably why it is one of my favorite cities in the world (Brighton, U.K. is probably my ultimate favorite). When New Orleans was thrusted into the center of national debates over Confederate iconography last Spring, my decision to pursue my academic interests in South Louisiana proved appropriate. Observing the numerous protests that ensued firsthand after the city unveiled its plan to remove four of its Confederate monuments is perhaps my most memorable research experience.

Not long after arriving in Louisiana, I was lucky enough to be offered the chance to work part-time for the AAG Review of Books under Kent Mathewson, the publication’s Editor-in-Chief and my advisor. This was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up and in the two years I spent working in the role, I thoroughly enjoyed commissioning, coordinating, and editing some 250+ book reviews. As an early career scholar, working so closely with Kent and our associate editors was an invaluable experience that taught me so much about editing and the academic publishing process. Personally, I found liaising with many distinguished leaders from across the discipline, commissioning significant books for review, and working with the AAG’s fantastic publications team in D.C. to be the most enjoyable aspects of my work. As I reflect on my stint working for the AAG Review of Books, I’m going to sorely miss being surrounded by bookcase upon bookcase full of new and exciting work that spans the entire discipline.