I’ve been mainly pursuing various themes in the history of twentieth-century geography.

I’ve worked on the role played during the Second World War of several American geographers especially within the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA). More recently, along with Elliott Child, UBC, we’ve looked directly at the roles of the CIA and geographers in the larger project of Cold War Area Studies.

At the same time, I’ve also been interested in a parallel group of German geographers during the same period who worked for the Nazis, particularly, the Haushofers, father and son, Walter Christaller, and August Lösch.

An interest in the mid-twentieth geographer William Warntz led me to research early computerization, and followed by an examination of its contemporary manifestation, Big Data. I’ve also been interested in early forms of Big Data during the Vietnam War, including as GIS. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was a key promoter.

Most recently, I’ve looked at some of geography’s 1960s Vietnam War protestors, as well as those concerned with Civil Rights. The most important was Bill Bunge. I’ve published a series of papers specifically on Bunge’s life and works.

I am also involved in a larger project concerned to write about the history of North American radical geography from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. A jointly edited book with Eric Sheppard, Spatial Histories of North American Radical Geography, is in preparation, due out in 2019. In early 2018 I published an experimental textbook in economic geography with Brett Christophers, Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction.

And finally, I continue to work with Tom Hutton, School of Community and Regional Planning, UBC, on the innovation economies of Vancouver and Seattle, recently writing briefing papers for Metrovancouver Planning Department.

Honours: Distinguished University Scholar, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Fellow of the British Academy.

2022

Dufty-Jones, R., C. Gibson, and T. J. Barnes. 2022. Writing economies and economies of writing. EPA: Economy and Space 54(2): 370-81.

2021

Bekaroğlu, E. and T. J. Barnes. 2021. Dictatorships and universities: The 1980 Turkish military coup d’état
and Turkish geography. Political Geography 91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102481.

2020

BARNES, T. J. 2020. Rorty, conversation and the power of maps.  In The power of pragmatism: Knowledge production and social inquiry, edited by J. Wills and R. Lake, 102-116. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

CHILD, E. and BARNES, T. J. 2020. State and Territory.  In The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography Volume 2, edited by M. Domosh, M. Heffernan and C. W. J. Withers, 468-496. London: Sage.

2019

BARNES, T. J. 2019 ‘Material for thought’ Political Geography 69(March), 177-179

BARNES, T. J. and CHRISTOPHERS, B. 2019 ‘Book review forum response’ The AAG Review of Books 7(1), 64-67

CHILD, E. C. and BARNES, T. J. 2019 ‘American imperial expansion and area studies without geography’ Journal of Historical Geography 66, 43-54

BARNES, T. J. 2019 The importance of ‘being various’: a commentary on ‘Moving beyond Anglo-American economic geography.’ International Journal of Urban Sciences 23(2), 170-176

BARNES, T. J. 2019 ‘Founder’s Medal’ The Geographical Journal 185(3), 366-367

2018

BARNES, T. J. and CHRISTOPHERS, B. 2018 Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction (Oxford and Chichester: John Wiley and Sons)

BARNES, T. J. 2018 ‘A marginal man and his central contributions: The creative spaces of William (‘Wild Bill’) Bunge and American geography’ Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(8), 1697–1715  https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17707524

BARNES, T. J., CHRISTOPHERS, B., NEWMAN, K., PECK, J., POON, J. and YEUNG, H. 2018 ‘Rediscovering space: Environment and Planning enters its second half century’ Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(1), 3-4  https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17742997

BARNES, T. J. 2018 ‘Decline and fall?’ Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(7), 1496–1499  https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X18781087

BARNES, T. J. 2018 ‘A hundred-year classic: Peter Haggett’s Locational Analysis in Human Geography (1965)’ Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 100(3), 294-299  https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2018.1471728

CHILD, E. C. and BARNES, T. J. 2018 ‘American imperial expansion and area studies without geography’ Journal of Historical Geography  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2018.08.001