John Agnew

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John Agnew joined the UCLA Department of Geography in 1996. He is a specialist in political geography, European urbanization and international political economy. A native of Britain, he taught in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in New York before joining UCLA, where he chaired his department from 1998 to 2002. His current research projects include a study of borders and state-building in southeast Europe; local and regional aspects of electoral support for Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right coalition in Italy between 1994 and 2006; and how sovereignty operates in non-territorial as well as territorial ways in a world of radically uneven sovereign powers.

Agnew teaches across the curriculum with a regular offering of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. As a student, he most appreciated the courses that were presented as the beginning of a process of critical learning about a given topic rather than as the final word on a subject. As a result, his main desire as a teacher is to point beyond the courses themselves to the groundwork they can lay for the students’ future intellectual and career development. He is strongly committed in all of his courses to opening students up to what can be called “the geographical imagination” about the world with a particular stress on understanding politics and urbanization in terms of cartographic and visual modes of thinking. He openly discusses the importance of recognizing the distinctive theoretical assumptions and methodologies that different groups of scholars bring to the same subject matter.

Agnew has received numerous academic honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Association of American Geographers. He also has been recognized with visiting professorships at such universities as Cambridge, Chicago and University College London. In 2000, he delivered the prestigious Hettner Lectures at the University of Heidelberg.

He is the author of a number of books and articles including Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power, winner of the prestigious Choice Outstanding Title Award for 2005; Place and Politics in Modern Italy; and “Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (2005). He is currently co-editor of the journal Geopolitics.