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John C. Hudson

Professor; Director of Geography Program

PhD Iowa 1967

Research and teaching interests

Cultural and physical geography of North America, biogeography, economic geography, cartography and mapping, geographic information systems. 

Biography

John C. Hudson, who joined the Northwestern University faculty in 1971, has been a member of the Anthropology Department since 1987, when geography activities were moved to anthropology.  From 1975 to 1982, he was editor of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers.  

Among his books are Plains Country Towns (University of Minnesota Press, 1985) which won the first J. B. Jackson Prize awarded by the Association of American Geographers; Making the Corn Belt (Indiana University Press, 1994); Across This Land: A Regional Geography of the United States and Canada (Johns Hopkins, 2020); and Chicago: A Geography of the City and Its Region (University of Chicago Press, 2006).  

He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1988-89.  He has published articles on mathematical geography, historical migration patterns, and the settlement history of the Great Plains. 


Recent courses taught  

Geography 

  • 211 - World Biogeography
  • 235 - Atmosphere and Climate
  • 240 - Economic Geography
  • 313 - North America
  • 328 - Human Use of the Earth
  • 341 - Principles of Cartography
  • 343 - Geographic Information Systems 

Selected publications

Books 
2020  Across This Land: A Regional Geography of the United States and Canada. Johns Hopkins University Press. 

2016  (with Christopher R. Laingen) American Farms, American Food.  A Geography of Agriculture and Food Production in the United States.   Lanham MD  Lexington Books.