Published Articles

My latest published work is "Geopolitics with and without Geography: The Rise and Fall of Maps as Visual Arguments," a chapter in the Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Geopolitics. In addition to a discussion of how maps have been included, or absent, in geopolitical writing, I also made ten original maps for the book.

I launched this site after publishing "Thinking in Space: The Role of Geography in National Security Decision-making" in the November 2019 issue of Texas National Security Review. 

Cartographic Perspectives No. 97, published by NACIS, included my peer-reviewed article on the mapmaker and geography textbook author James Monteith, who I call "the master of the margins." Full text of the article is open access and available here. More scans of Monteith maps are at mapspam.net.

The difference between thinking about maritime space and territorial space are key themes in my article,  The 1988 Blues—Admirals, Activists, and the Development of the Chinese Maritime Identity  in Naval War College Review.

While not really a piece about "thinking in space," there are a couple of geographic arguments, and one original map, in "Same Water, Different Dreams: Salient Lessons of the Sino-Japanese War for Future Naval Warfare" in Journal of Advanced Military Studies. 

My article in Naval History on Alexander Macomb Mason brings together naval issues, history, and innovation: Forgotten American Innovator. There is also a tie to cartography in that Mason later became an important explorer and mapmaker, but that is a longer story (for the book-length biography of Mason that I am never quite done with).

I really enjoyed writing this article for Proceedings with CDR Chris Nelson. It is not primarily on geography or cartography but does talk about the value of paper maps and analog visualization.

Another article in Proceedings, "Go Get Mahan's Yardstick" is here. The original map I made for this article (not used by USNI, is here.)

"The Geographic President: How Franklin D. Roosevelt Used Maps to Make and Communicate Strategy," is in the Spring 2020 edition of The Portolan from the Washington Map Society, and was presented at the June 2020 WMS meeting. This piece was originally written in early 2019.

An article on Pacific Islands strategic geography, "The Second Island Cloud," is here. Although the argument in the piece is very much a geographic one, the original map for this article was not included by JFQ and is here.

I published an article on the making and revision of 19th century maps of central Africa in Issue 112 (Winter 2021) of The Portolan: "The Brief Cartographic Life of Lake Alexandra."

My review of Patrick Ellis' book Aeroscopics: Media of the Bird's Eye View is in Imago Mundi, Vol. 72:1 (2022).

The TNSR version of Thinking in Space got a nice writeup in Le Point, for those who read French.

Andrew Erickson's site is a great resource on a variety of topics and he was kind enough to create a "bookshelf" of some of my work.