Gerard Toal

Dr Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) is Professor of Government and International Affairs and Director of the Masters of Public and International Affairs program, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Northern Capital Region campus. Toal grew up in the border region of Ireland. He received a B.A. in History and Geography from National University of Ireland, Maynooth with First Class Honours in 1982. He obtained a M.A. in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Political geography from Syracuse University in 1989. Dr John Agnew, current Professor of Geography at University of California Los Angeles, was his academic supervisor advisor. Toal has held fellowships at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, and the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. In 2005 he testified before the United States Congress on political developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Toal’s research specializations include critical geopolitics, nationalism, political geography, post-Communism, and globalization. He conducts research in Washington DC, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the North Caucasus region. Ó Tuathail has been a founding figure in establishing "Critical Geopolitics" as a domain of research within political geography and international relations. He is one of the contemporary geographers featured in the 2004 book "Key Thinkers in Space and Place". His latest work is "The Geopolitics Reader" (second edition, 2006). He is completing a manuscript entitled "Reversing Ethnic Cleansing: Population Displacement and Return in Bosnia-Herzegovina", co-authored with Dr Carl Dahlman (a former Virginia Tech student and currently Associate Professor of Geography at Miami University in Ohio) that pulls together their research on the returns process in that country since 2002. Professor Toal is an associate editor of "Geopolitics and Eurasian Geography and Economics", as well as an editorial board member of "Political Geography".

elected books

* G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge, "A Geopolitics Reader". Second edition. Routledge, 2006.

* J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal, eds. "A Companion to Political Geography". Blackwell, 2004.

* S. Dalby and G. Ó Tuathail, eds., "Rethinking Geopolitics". Routledge, 1998.

* G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge, "A Geopolitics Reader". First edition. Routledge, 1998.

* A. Herod, G. Ó Tuathail and S. Roberts, eds. "An Unruly World? Geography, Globalization and Governance". Routledge, 1998.

* G. Ó Tuathail, "Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space". Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Volume 6 in the Borderlines series) and London: Routledge, 1996.

External links

* [http://www.toal.net Gerard Toal's homepage]