Dr. Nicholas Crane

 

Academic Areas of Expertise:

Cultural geography; cultural politics; political economy; political geography; social movements; Mexico and the Americas; Turkey and the Middle East

Curriculum Vitae

Biography:

Nicholas Jon Crane is an Associate Professor of Geography and International Studies. Crane teaches courses in cultural and political geography, with foci 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 youth subcultures and community projects in his hometown, Columbus, Ohio. These experiences inspired travel to Mexico City in 2009, where Crane 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’s research in central Mexico continues through a collaborative project on the political economy of violence in the region. More recently, Crane developed related research on urban cultural landscapes in Turkey. Crane has published widely in top ranking journals, high profile edited collections, and art exhibition catalogues. His publications deal with a range of themes including the forms and practices of contemporary social movements, the spatiality of sovereign power, relationships between urban/peri-urban landscapes and violence, place-based memories of political violence, and methodologies of cultural and political geography. Since 2018, Crane has been the section editor for political geography in the journal Geography Compass.

Current Research Projects:

Dr. Crane is a cultural and political geographer. Crane’s research focuses on geographies of social justice and injustice in the Americas, with a secondary emphasis on the Middle East. His projects include:

• A book (Political Geographies: The Basics), under contract with Routledge;
• Mixed-methods, collaborative research on ‘landscapes of disappearance’ in central Mexico (since 2017);
• Ethnographic and archival research on youth protest and memory in post-1968 Mexico City (since 2010);
• Mixed-methods research on the spatiality of relationships between violence and urban economic development in contemporary Turkey (since 2021);
• And interpretive, historical-geographical research on artistic practice, with a particular focus on art that intervenes in understandings or experiences of the past, especially past political violence.

Dr. Crane is interested in advising graduate students in cultural geography, political geography, cultural studies, and on themes in the regional geography of Latin America or the Middle East.