Let Geography Die: Chasing Derwent's Ghost at Harvard

by Alison Mountz, Kira Williams

Overview

An investigative history of the closure of Harvard University’s geography program in the mid-twentieth century due to homophobia and wider institutional politics.

Let Geography Die tells the little-known and oft-misunderstood story of geographical research and education at Harvard University. In investigative fashion, Alison Mountz and Kira Williams unearth the personal and institutional secrets that drove the sudden closure of Harvard's geography program at the precise moment that it reached its apex. At the heart of this narrative are the hidden personal lives of the queer men recruited to build the geography program—the same ones who were later blamed for its demise. Chief among these figures is Derwent Whittlesey, who eventually became Harvard's last lone geography professor, once the program he had so successfully built was closed around him.

The book weaves together several histories at once: the enactment of homophobic policies under McCarthyism designed to purge queer people from university campuses and government offices; a university president with little regard for the social sciences on a personal mission to dissolve geographic education; fierce, if failed, university politicking to rescue and then resuscitate the program; personal queer lives hidden in plain sight on the edge of campus; and two contemporary queer political geographers on a mission to memorialize the queer people blamed for society's ills.

Let Geography Die exposes the truth behind this important story—as well as its wider haunting of an entire discipline 75 years later—while also restoring the humanity of the central characters involved, especially Derwent Whittlesey.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262381956
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	07/29/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	37 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Alison Mountz is Professor of Geography and Vice-Principal of Research & Innovation at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She is the author or coauthor of award-winning books, including Seeking Asylum; Boats, Borders, and Bases; and The Death of Asylum.

Kira Williams is a political geographer and a data scientist at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on international migration, borders, political geography, analytical methodology, and statistics. She has published over 20 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and an edited volume.

Table of Contents

Continuities
Prologue: Let Geography Die
Chapter 1 - Introduction: Investigating two deaths and subsequent hauntings
Chapter 2 - A haunting: the life, death, and (after)life of Derwent Whittlesey
Chapter 3 - “With much love, Emeline”: correspondence between “the remarkable Emeline
McSweeney” and Derwent Whittlesey
Chapter 4 - The rise, fall and “unfinished business” of geography at Harvard
Chapter 5 - A tragedy in three acts: Isaiah Bowman and Harvard geography
Chapter 6 - Everyone has secrets: Conant’s campaigns, contradictions, and impending destruction
Chapter 7 - Talking with ghosts
Chapter 8 - On secrets and afterlives

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This important work traces the impact of the 1948 decision to ‘let geography die’ at Harvard, offering new insights about Cold War–era homophobia and the feminization of human geography as a discipline."
—Karen Graves, author of And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers

“American geography remains haunted by the closure of Harvard’s Geography Department. Mountz and Williams’s book brilliantly exorcises that ghost, revealing the closeted history of the discipline by telling moving stories of three male gay geographers.”
—Trevor J. Barnes, Professor and Distinguished University Scholar, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

“At a time of elevated threats to academia and politically motivated attacks on entire fields of scholarship, this impressively researched story of the elimination of geography from the Harvard curriculum illustrates how entrenched biases of a powerful decision-maker can have long-lasting and widespread effects.”
—Rowan Flad, John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology, Harvard University