UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State Department of Geography will kick off its fall 2024 "Coffee Hour" lecture series with a talk by Karl Zimmerer, professor of geography, ecology, and rural sociology at Penn State. The event will take place from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 6, in 112 Walker Building on the University Park campus and also will be accessible via Zoom.
Zimmerer’s talk, titled "Thresholds of Research in Environment-Society Geography: A Personal Retrospective and Prospectus," will provide a comprehensive overview of his research in various areas of environment-society geography.
His presentation will focus on four key themes: food biodiversity adaptations amid everyday change and acute crises, the well-being and biodiversity-food-energy-water-society nexus (BFEWS), the geographic resilience of agricultural and food landscapes, and sustainability and justice within the context of the Plantationocene. Zimmerer will discuss these research areas through the lens of current academic, policy, and public debates and discussions.
Zimmerer is a recognized leader in the field, specializing in global food geographies. His work employs both ecological and social scientific approaches to study human-environment dynamics, particularly in relation to biodiversity in food systems and land use worldwide. Zimmerer’s contributions to the field have earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship and election to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Zimmerer also leads sustainability research in the Geographic Synthesis for Social and Ecological Sustainability (GeoSyntheSES) Lab and is the founding editor of the journal Urban Agriculture-Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. Before joining Penn State, Zimmerer was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught geography, environmental studies and Latin American studies.
Zimmerer has authored and edited seven books, including "Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihoods in the Peruvian Andes," and published more than 100 lead-author articles in top peer-reviewed journals such as Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He earned his doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley.
Zimmerer's talk is the first in the fall 2024 "Coffee Hour" seminar series hosted by Penn State’s Department of Geography. For more information and to access the Zoom link, visit the Coffee Hour event webpage.