Dr. Nicholas Crane

Nicholas Jon Crane is an Associate Professor of Geography and International Studies. He is also the Director of the International Studies undergraduate program in the School of Politics, Public Affairs, and International Studies.

 

Crane teaches courses in cultural and political geography, including regional courses focused on the Americas and the Middle East. Crane’s interest in cultural production and forms of political engagement in the Middle East emerged from his family life, as the son of an immigrant from Turkey and a US-born specialist in Islamic art and architecture. Crane became more concretely interested in politics (lowercase-p politics) by participating in community-based projects in his hometown, Columbus, Ohio. These experiences inspired travel to Mexico City in 2009, where he developed a research idea that would help him return to central Mexico twice per year while he completed his PhD in Geography at Ohio State (2014). Crane remains well connected with colleagues and communities in central Mexico and, initially with support as a Seibold Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences in 2023-23, he has also been cultivating and maintaining connections with academics and practitioners in the Aegean region of Turkey, centered on Izmir. In both regions (central Mexico and Aegean Turkey), Crane has been interested in a wide range of cultural-political and political-economic processes of urban transformation and popular mobilization. Crane's courses at UW not only help students become proficient in academic fields of study like cultural geography, cultural studies, political geography, and so on; the courses are also informed by his experiences across this trajectory, which — for students — serve as points of reference for thinking about how these academic fields of study are relevant to practices of global engagement, broadly thought. 

 

In his research life, Crane is mostly focused on two agendas:

 

Crane's work in central Mexico has continued in the years since his field research for his PhD, mostly through collaboration with Oliver Hernández Lara (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México) and David Tapia Martínez (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla). As part of this research team, Crane is writing and publishing in both English and Spanish. Crane's collaboration with Hernández Lara and Tapia Martínez has generated many publications in recent years, on a variety of themes, including place-based protest art (in Human Geography), "metabolic exchange" in peripheralized regions of the Mexico City megalopolis (in Journal of Latin American Geography), and landscape as a technology of sovereign power (in Bajo el Volcán). This collaborative work is ongoing.

 

Crane began contributing to the interdisciplinary field of Turkish Studies more recently. Consistent with some prominent themes in that interdisciplinary field of study (state formation, popular mobilization, the cultural politics of nationhood, and so on), Crane has been interested to think across contexts of state-backed urbanization to consider how multiple forms of violence may be made unaccountable, or naturalized, through transformations and representations of place. Some of Crane's efforts in this direction are captured in his editorial work for a special issue of the journal Justice, Power and Resistance on "Violence and Urban Transformation in Contemporary Turkey," guest edited with Çağlar Dölek (Cal Poly Humboldt).

 

By way of and beyond these research agendas, Crane has for many years published widely in top ranking journals and high-profile edited collections. His publications deal with a range of themes including the forms and practices of contemporary social movements, the spatiality of sovereign power, transformations of peri-urban landscapes, place-based memories of political violence, and methodologies of cultural and political geography. Crane is an editorial board member for two academic research journals in Turkey — Yeni Medya/New Media and Türk Coğrafya Dergisi/Turkish Geographical Review. Since 2018, Crane has also been the section editor for political geography in the journal Geography Compass.