Faculty
The Faculty in the Department of Geography & Environmental Studies at UHH represent a unique combination of teaching skills, research grants, notable publications, and accessibility. The faculty have recieved three Regent's Awards for Teaching Excellence, numerous and considerable grants in geographic / environmental research, published scores of books and articles about local, regional, and global issues, all in addition to teaching a varied and unique geography & environmental studies curriculum.
-
James "Jim" Juvik
Professor James Juvik is Chair of the Department. He teaches courses in Physical Geography including biogeography, climatology, field methods and regional courses dealing with Hawai`i and the Pacific. Research interests focus on mountain climatology and hydrology (specifically atmosphere/vegetation interaction in tropical montane cloud forests), and island biogeography, including wildlife conservation and endangered species recovery strategies. He has worked extensively in Australia, New Zealand and Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Ocean Islands.
-
Sonia Juvik
Sonia Juvik teaches classes in cultural, economic and urban geography, introductory and advanced planning, natural resources management, and special topics in natural resources and human geography. Her research interest includes issues in community development, land use planning/policy, and resource management in Hawai`i, Solomon Islands, Australia, and the Pacific Basin. Dr. Juvik was born in Jamaica, W.I. and received her undergraduate training at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She also studied at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa (M.A.) and Australia National University in Canberra (Ph.D.). She joined the UH Hilo Geography Department in 1984 and in addition to teaching has periodically served as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
-
Kathryn Besio
Kathryn Besio is an Associate Professor of Geography in the department. She is a social/cultural geographer, and is interested in how the violent and messy legacies of colonialisms manifest in arguably postcolonial material inequalities of class, gender and ethnic privilege in places as seemingly disconnected as Hawai`i, New Zealand and Pakistan. At UHH, she teaches courses in cultural geography, specifically, Geography and Contemporary Society (GEOG 103), Cultural Geography (GEOG 328), Food and Societies (GEOG 312), Gender, Place and Environment (GEOG 440) and Tourism Geographies (GEOG 331). Her interests on the links between research and representational practices have led to a number of publications on autoethnography. Currently, she is researching "Local" and local food on the island of Hawai`i, and the intersections between plantation agriculture, industrial agriculture, small scale agriculture, home gardens, Hawai`i Regional Cuisine, tourism and local identities.
-
Drew Kapp
Drew has taught classes both in-person and online in world regional geography, human geography, geography of Hawai`i, and geography of North America. He worked as a cartographic editor and contributing author for the 1998 edition of the "Atlas of Hawai`i." He's interested in cultural geography, maps and other visual representations of place, and has conducted some research and presented findings on pictorial tourist maps of Hawai`i, as well as Native Hawaiian student views on sovereignty. Drew's teaching is also informed by his participation in the Uluakea faculty development program out of the Kipuka Native Hawaiian Student Center at UH Hilo.
-
Nan Elmer
Nan Elmer received her BA from Humboldt State University in physical geography and her MA from University of Hawai`i at Manoa in cultural geography. Her interests are in political and cultural change over time and space. Nan teaches world regional geography, introductory physical geography, and the contemporary Middle East ~ including gender issues in that region.
-
Jonathan Price
Jonathan Price received a B.S. in Geography with a minor in Botany from University of California at Davis in 1994. He received a PhD in Geography from University of California at Davis in 2002. He went on to a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., followed by three years working with USGS Biological Resources Discipline at the Kilauea Field Station. Dr. Price has done research in Hawai`i for over ten years, focusing on mapping the distributions of species and communities. The major theme is to understand spatial patterns in biodiversity, including how these patterns have originated and how human activity has modified them. He utilizes GIS to identify biodiversity hotspots for native bird and plant species, search for rare species, and locate appropriate areas for the restoration of threatened and endangered species.
-
Donna Delparte
Dr. Delparte received her PhD from the University of Calgary and has recently joined the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies. She brings expertise in the areas of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), terrain modeling, visualization and natural hazards. Her research work has specifically focused on developing models for terrain analysis and integrating expert knowledge into GIS. Dr. Delparte is part of the Cyberinfrastructure team supported by an EPSCoR research grant for data integration and visualization.
-
Jeffrey Sasha Davis
Sasha's teaching and research focuses on the intersection of environmental and social issues as well as on the relationships between nature and society. Over the past decade his research has focused on environmental contamination, conservation, resource management and politics near American military installations in the Marshall Islands, Hawai`i, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. More recently he has also focused on environmental and social movements seeking to re-imagine global geopolitics, environmental sustainability and security. Sasha received a BS and MA in Geography from Northern Arizona University and his PhD in Geography from Penn State University. Before joining the faculty at UH Hilo he previously taught courses at Penn State, UH Manoa and the University of Vermont.