Greetings from Bolton Hall, where we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of spring! Thanks to the long winter, many of us are looking forward to this year’s Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, which will take place in sunny Tampa. The department will be well represented at the conference – ten faculty and eleven graduate students will be participating – and we are pleased that once again we can support the travel of our students. Despite (or maybe because of) the long winter, we have been  keeping busy, and we are proud to share our congratulations to several faculty and students.

Associate Professor Rina Ghose has been unanimously recommended to be promoted to Full Professor by the Social Science Executive Committee. Also, we’re very pleased to announce that one of our graduate students, Margaret Pettygrove, has been awarded a UWM Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship for the 2014-2015 academic year, continuing our long string of success for this very competitive fellowship. In addition, we have just learned that Assistant Professor Anne Bonds and her collaborators have received a prestigious and highly competitive Transdisciplinary Challenge Grant from UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies.

This semester we are honored to welcome two distinguished guest speakers in our long-running and highly successful Harold and Florence Mayer Lecture series. The first was Professor Audrey Kobayashi of Queen’s University, a former president of the Association of American Geographers and one of the discipline’s most prominent scholars of race and racism. At Professor Kobayashi’s lecture, we were privileged to have with us our own Distinguished Professor Emeritus Harold M. Rose, in whose honor the Association of American Geographers recently created an award for Anti-Racism Research and Practice. We are laying the groundwork for a new lecture series in honor of Distinguished Professor Rose, and we look forward to sharing news about this in upcoming newsletters.

We hope you enjoy this spring’s issue, which features more details on the announcements above, as well as news from our faculty, current students, and several of our recent alumni. We’d love to share even more stories from alumni in future issues, and we encourage you to send us your news and photos – you’ll find contact information to the right or submit them online at https://uwm.edu/letsci/geography/alumni/alumniform.cfm.

Professor Changshan Wu