When I was working as a professional
drafter, periodically somebody would circulate this description of
engineers and architects. It seems engineers know a great deal about a
few things, and architects know a little bit about lots of things, and
over time the engineers get to know more and more about less and less,
while the architects get to know less and less about more and more. I
used to puzzle over this and try to figure out which one I was like. But
it never made much sense to me; I wanted to know more and more about more
and more. That's why I became neither an architect nor an engineer, but a
geographer.
My adviser told me for years that I needed to narrow my focus. Being something of a Renaissance woman, I found this pretty hard, and not even particularly desirable. But I've finally figured out that I don't have to do research on all my interests--and that I can do better work on those that remain because they are fewer (okay, duh....). My main research and teaching interests center topically around 1) human settlement and 2) indigenous peoples in global context, and regionally around 1) North America (particularly the South, and especially North Carolina) and 2) Australia. Thematically, I consider myself a historical/urban/cultural geographer, with skills in GIS and cartography.
I completed my dissertation in fall of 2006 and officially graduated in May 2007. The dissertation was only the beginning of a probably lifelong project on the development of the Piedmont Urban Crescent, a polycentric urban region that dominates the urban structure of North Carolina. In this first stage, I began the huge task of analyzing the earliest settler land grant documents from the area to tease out the influence of the Indian Trading Path, a contact-era transport route of indigenous origin. Among other things, I developed a model at two scales to explain how the Path could affect town and settlement system development as part of the initial conditions on the landscape. This marks a major change from earlier town-formation models, which assumed Europeans were inscribing their settlement landscapes onto a "blank slate". I also developed a concrete methodology for elucidating the influence of indigenous landscape features on settler landscapes, involving the transformation of archival data at the microscale to geographic knowledge at the regional scale. This work, which was very much dependent on a database designed for me by UNC Information Science doctoral student Mary Ruvane, is to be featured in a forthcoming book by David Bodenhamer of the Polis Center as an example of how GIS can be used in history and the humanities.
Several maps from my dissertation, and the dissertation itself, can be viewed at http://www.unc.edu/~grdobbs/dissmaps/. You can also download my NC Piedmont historical county boundaries at http://www.unc.edu/~grdobbs/histcounties/, as graphics, a poster, or shapefiles.
Currently I am an assistant professor of geography in the Department of Social Sciences at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas.
I also teach a correspondence course on North America for UNC's
Independent Studies. I hold adjunct lecturer status in the Geography Department at UNC-Chapel Hill.
My current CV (pdf)
(updated
2/26/08)
My old (pre-academic) technical resume
My other web pages: