I am a human geographer with exceptionally wide-ranging interests. Over the years, in different professional capacities, I have had the opportunity to study a diverse plethora of topics in economic, political, and social geography. Running throughout this panoply is my interest in political economy as it pertains to the construction of space and place. I have consciously sought to position myself within the discipline at the intersections of traditional economic geography and contemporary social theory. I have found keeping a leg in each camp to be rewarding and fruitful. In this vein, my work straddles traditional quantitative, empirical approaches on the one hand and contemporary, qualitative, theoretical perspectives on the other.

The heart of my research and teaching interests lies within the broad domain of regional development, emphasizing producer services and telecommunications. Early in my career I focused on the lumber industry and the changing impacts of ports; I also made extensive use of input-output analysis, and occasionally still do. More recently, I have studied, among other things, New York’s role as a global city, commercial real estate trends, information services in the Dominican Republic, offshore banking in Panama and Bahrain, electronic currency transactions, international trade of legal and engineering services, the savings and loan industry, bank failures, mergers and acquisitions in the telecommunications industry, impacts of the stock market boom, the geopolitics of the satellite industry and its heated competition with fiber optics, the globalization of back offices and clerical work, and the complex geographies of cyberspace, including uneven patterns of access and its varying effects in different cultural contexts. I have also written widely on the regional impacts of military spending, and have an ongoing interest in international trade and trade agreements. Following the contested 2000 presidential election, I became interested in spatial patterns and effects of voting technologies, and have worked on the spatial dynamics of the Electoral College. More recently, I have authored or co-authored several papers concerning religious diversity at the regional, national, and global scales.

I have sought to complement these empirical studies with conceptual and theoretical analyses of various sorts. I draw from two major intellectual traditions: Marxism, which I find useful in bringing to bear issues of class, power, and historical context, and phenomenology, which I think is central to a serious appreciation of human intentionality and consciousness. I was active in the shift toward postmodernism and poststructuralism, and find this to be an inspirational body of literature today. Thus, invoking these strands of inquiry, I have written about globalization and its relations to the unique, idiosyncratic characteristics of individual places; the inter-relations between social theory and regional science; structuration theory; theories of contingency, alternate-worlds, and complexity; and the implications of capital hypermobility for the post-Keynesian state. I have also published reviews of the state of social theory in human geography as well as its implications for geographic pedagogy. More recently, this line of thought has led me to explore actor-network theory and commodity chain analysis. I sutured together these varying strands of thought in a recent book on the historical geographies of time-space compression, which attempts to illustrate how time and space are social constructions, molded and reformed to suit varying historical and geographic circumstances.

Running throughout this wide array of topics is a lifelong interest in how different perspectives on space intersect and collide. I enjoy exploring the similarities and differences that run through contrasting bodies of theory, and in teaching, attempt to draw out the strengths and weaknesses of each school. Academic research is at its richest when it brings different lines of thought into a creative tension with one another. I am uncomfortable being pigeonholed in a single, convenient category (e.g., “economic geographer” or “urban geographer”), maintaining instead that there is no necessity of being simply one or the other. It is possible, even necessary, I think, to adhere to several lines of thought simultaneously, to use different languages and perspectives to study different problems and issues, and to participate vigorously in multiple intellectual communities. Such a stance does not lead to eclectic superficiality; rather, it allows me, or so I hope, to draw upon contrasting perspectives, to select the best each has to offer, and to be inspired by their differences. Geography has always been a self-consciously intentionally inter-disciplinary body of thought, drawing from and in turn contributing to neighboring disciplines. Thus, I celebrate the discipline’s diversity by conscientiously engaging in cross-disciplinary work. I read, as much as time allows, the literatures in History, Anthropology, Sociology, and Political Economy, as well as popular accounts of the history and philosophy of science.

2008 Warf, B. Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies. London: Routledge.

2008 Warf, B. and S. Arias, eds. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge.

2007 Stutz, F. and B. Warf. The World Economy: Resources, Location, Trade, and Development. 5th edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

2006 Warf, B., ed. Encyclopedia of Human Geography. London: Sage.

2004 Bryson, J., P. Daniels, and B. Warf. Service Worlds: People, Organizations, and Technologies. London: Routledge.

2004 Janelle, D., B. Warf, and K. Hanson, eds. WorldMinds: Geographic Perspectives on 100 Problems. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

2008 Warf, B. “From Surfaces to Networks.” In The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. B. Warf and S. Arias, eds. London: Routledge. pp. 59-76.

2007 Warf, B. “Communicating.” In Companion Encyclopedia of Geography: From the Local to the Global. I. Douglas, R. Huggett, and C. Perkins, eds.London: Routledge. pp. 965-977.

2007 Warf, B. “Embodied Information, Actor-Networks, and Global Value-Added Services.” In The Handbook of Service Industries. J. Bryson and P. Daniels, eds. London: Elgar. pp. 379-394.

2004 Warf, B., D. Janelle, and K. Hanson. “Introduction.” In WorldMinds: GeographicPerspectives on 100 Problems. D. Janelle, B. Warf, and K. Hanson, eds. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

2009 Warf, B. “The U.S. Electoral College and Spatial Biases in Voter Power.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99:184-204.

2009 Warf, B. “Diverse Spatialities of the Latin American and Caribbean Internet.” Journal of Latin American Geography 8(2):125-145.

2008 Warf, B. and M. Winsberg. “The Geography of Religious Diversity in the United States.” Professional Geographer 60:413-424.

2007 Warf, B. “Oligopolization of Global Media and Telecommunications and its Implications for Democracy.” Ethics, Place and Environment 10:89-105.

2007 Warf, B. “Geographies of the Tropical Internet: An Overview.”Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 28:220-238.

2007 Warf, B. and P. Vincent. “Multiple Geographies of the Arab Internet.” Area 39:83-96.

2007 Warf, B. “Geopolitics of the Satellite Industry.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 98:385-397.

2007 Warf, B. and P. Vincent. “Religious Diversity across the Globe: A Geographic Exploration.” Social and Cultural Geography 8:597-613.

2006 Warf, B. “International Competition between Satellite and Fiber Optic Carriers: A Geographic Perspective.” The Professional Geographer 58:1-11.

2006 Warf, B. “Religious Diversity across the North American Urban System.” Urban Geography 27:549-566.

2006 Warf, B. “Voting Technologies and Residual Ballots in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential Elections.” Political Geography 27:664-677.

2006 Ueland, J. and B. Warf. “Racialized Topographies: Altitude and Race in Southern Cities.” Geographical Review 96:50-78.