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K-State Today

November 2, 2015

The geographer of the U.S. to speak Nov. 6

Submitted by Richard Marston

Dr. Lee R. Schwartz

Lee R. Schwartz, the geographer of the U.S. with the State Department, will present a public lecture at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 6, in the K-State Student Union Little Theatre. He will present "Geography in Support of Diplomacy-Views from the U.S. Geographer."

Schwartz's lecture is sponsored by the Beta Psi Chapter of Gamma Theta Upsilon, the International honor society in geography, and the K-State geography department.

Schwartz also is the director of the Office of The Geographer and Global Issues. He is the State Department's ninth geographer — appointed in 2005 — a position established in 1921, and bears the statutory responsibility for providing guidance to all federal agencies on questions of international boundaries and sovereignty claims.

At the State Department, he has directed research and analysis on global issues primarily related to complex humanitarian emergencies and has coordinated related fieldwork and applied geography projects overseas in the Balkans, central Asia, Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, the Horn of Africa and Haiti. His recent work has focused on ethnic conflict, refugee flows, peacekeeping operations, strategic warning and conflict mitigation and response, with an emphasis on geographic information systems, or GIS, and remote sensing coordination, as well as participatory mapping.

He earned his undergraduate degree from Bucknell University and his doctorate in geography is from Columbia University. His graduate research — sponsored by a Fulbright Fellowship — focused on the importance of rising nationalism in the non-Russian Soviet periphery.

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