Office Hours:
Tuesday, 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
Thursday, 9:45 - 10:45 a.m.

Anne K. Knowles
Associate Professor of Geography
McCardell Bicentennial Hall 328
Phone: 802.443.3434
Email: aknowles@middlebury.edu
Years at Midd: Since 2002
Degrees, Specializations & Interests:
B.A. in English, Duke University, 1979; M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989 and 1993.

Historical geography, historical GIS, 19th- century industrial labor and technology, geographies of the Holocaust.

Research Areas:


• Historical geography of North America
• Historical GIS in research and teaching
• 19th-century iron industry, particularly labor and technology
• Cultural and economic landscapes
• Geographies of the Holocaust


Courses taught at Middlebury College:

GEOG 0100    Place and Society
GEOG 0211     The Global Economy
GEOG 0218     Cultural Geography
GEOG 0219     Historical Geography of North America
GEOG 0224     A Place Called Wales
GEOG 0229    American Landscapes
GEOG 0320    Introduction to Geographic Information Systems
GEOG 0419    Seminar in Historical Geography: Visualizing the Past
GEOG 0420    GIS and Cartography Seminar
FYSE  1053     Place in the American Imagination
FYSE  1260     Holocaust Landscapes



Selected Publications:

Books and edited volumes

Knowles, Anne Kelly ed. 2008. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship. Digital supplement edited by Amy Hillier. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press.

Knowles, Anne Kelly ed. 2005. Emerging Trends in Historical GIS. Thematic Issue of Historical Geography, vol 33.

Knowles, Anne Kelly ed. 2002. Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press.

Knowles, Anne Kelly ed. 2000. Historical GIS: The Spatial Turn in Social Science History. Thematic issue of Social Science History, vol. 24, no. 3.

Knowles, Anne Kelly.  1997. Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial Frontier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Articles and book chapters


Knowles, Anne Kelly and Richard G. Healey. 2006. Geography, Timing, and Technology: A GIS-Based Analysis of Pennsylvania's Iron Industry, 1825-1875. In Journal of Economic History 66 (3): 608-34.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 2006. The white hands 'damn them...won't stick': Labor Scarcity and Spatial Discipline in the Antebellum Iron Industry. In Journal of Historical Geography 32 (1): 57-73.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 2002. Wheeling Iron and the Welsh: A Geographical Reading of ‘Life in the Iron Mills'. In Transnational West Virginia: Ethnic Work Communities during the Industrial Era, eds. Ronald Lewis and Kenneth Fones-Wolf, 216-241. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 2001. Afterword: Historical Geography since 1987. In North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent, 2nd ed., eds. Thomas F. McIlwraith and Edward K. Muller, 465-470. London: Rowman and Littlefield.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 2001. Labor, Race, and Technology in the Confederate Iron Industry. Technology and Culture 42 (1): 1-26.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 2000. A Case for Teaching Geographic Visualization without GIS. Cartographic Perspectives 36(spring): 24-37.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 2000. Mapping Wisconsin. Geographical Review 90 (2): 277-284.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 2000. Alma Mater: Cartographic Portraits of Wellesley College. Mercator’s World 5(November/December): 40-45.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 1999. Migration, Nationalism, and the Construction of Welsh Identity. In Nested Identities, eds. Guntram Herb and David Kaplan, 289-315. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 1998. The Structure of Rural Society in Northern Cardiganshire, 1800-1850. In Cardiganshire County History, Vol. 3: Cardiganshire in Modern Times, eds. Ieuan Gwynedd Jones and Geraint H. Jenkins, 76-93. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 1997. Religious Identity as Ethnic Identity: Welsh Settlement in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. In Wisconsin Land and Life, eds. Robert C. Ostergren and Thomas Vale, 282-299. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Knowles, Anne Kelly. 1995. Immigrant Trajectories through the Rural-Industrial Transition in Wales and the United States, 1795-1850. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85: 246-266.

In development

Knowles, Anne Kelly. Making Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (under contract, University of Chicago Press). This book explains the uneven, often fraught development of the American iron industry, focusing on the difficulties firms encountered when they attempted to transplant British iron-making technologies and labor to the very different geographical contexts of this country. The study is based on a historical GIS of antebellum iron works and case studies of pioneering large-scale iron companies across the eastern United States.