ALEXANDRIA FACULTY

 

 

 

 

Dr. Gerard Toal
(Gearóid Ó Tuathail)
Professor of Government and International Affairs. Director of the Government and International Affairs program.
toalg@vt.edu | (703) 706-8133

Dr. Toal's statement on PhD supervision.

ACADEMIC BIOGRAPHY

Education
Ph.D. Political Geography, Maxwell School, Syracuse University.

Courses Taught and Programs:
Global Conflicts
Critical Geopolitics
Discourse Analysis
Global Change and Local Impacts

Areas of Specialization:
Critical Geopolitics
Political geography
Nationalism
Ethnic Conflicts

Dr Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) research specializations include critical geopolitics, nationalism, political geography, post-Communism, and globalization. Gearóid ÓTuathail has been a founding figure in establishing Critical Geopolitics as a domain of research within political geography and international relations. He is one of the contemporary geographers featured in the 2004 book Key Thinkers in Space and Place. His latest book is Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Population Returns (Oxford, 2010) which he co-authored with Dr Carl Dahlman. The work provides a in-depth analysis of the localized geopolitics of displacement and returns in three Bosnian communities from 1992 to today. Since then he has conducted comparative work on Bosnia and the North Caucasus with Dr John O'Loughlin (also funded, like the Bosnian study, by the National Science Foundation). In 2008 he wrote a trilogy of essays on the 'geopolitical entanglements' of North Ossetia. His latest NSF grant is on the impact of Kosovo's independence on the operation of three Eurasian Quasi-States (Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia). For the abstract click here. His current book projects include a study comparing war outcomes in Bosnia and the North Caucasus, a work on US geopolitical culture and the Russian-Georgian-Ossetian war of August 2008, and the third edition of The Geopolitics Reader. Professor Toal is an associate editor of Geopolitics and Eurasian Geography and Economics, as well as an editorial board member of Political Geography. Toal has held fellowships at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, and the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. In 2005 he testified before the United States Congress on political developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Dr Gerard Toal (Gearóid ÓTuathail) was born and raised in the border region between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland in the late 60s and 70s. He received a B.A. in History and Geography from National University of Ireland, Maynooth with First Class Honors in 1982. He left Ireland for post-graduate study in America in September 1982. In 1984 he obtained a M.A. in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Political Geography from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. For further information on Gearóid Ó Tuathail, please consult his personal web site toal.net

RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS

G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge, A Geopolitics Reader. Second edition. Routledge, 2006.

J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal, eds., A Companion to Political Geography. Blackwell, 2004.

S. Dalby and G. Ó Tuathail, eds., Rethinking Geopolitics. Routledge, 1998.

G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge, A Geopolitics Reader. First edition. Routledge, 1998.

A. Herod, G. Ó Tuathail and S. Roberts, eds. An Unruly World? Geography, Globalization and Governance. Routledge, 1998.

G. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Volume 6 in the Borderlines series) and London: Routledge, 1996.

Graduate Courses Taught:
GIA 5254: Global Conflicts
GIA 5264: Global Change and Local Impacts
GIA 5404: Topics in Political Geography
GIA 5424: Communist and Post-Communist Systems
GIA 5444: International Politics
GIA 5474: Global Governance
GIA 5504: Discourse Analysis
GIA 6114: Critical Geopolitics