- Professor of Environmental Studies
- Director, Environmental Studies Program
Education
- PhD, geography, University of Texas at Austin
- MA, Latin American studies, Ohio University
- BA, University of California at Santa Cruz
Biography
I am an historical and cultural geographer whose research explores Atlantic environmental history, the history of cartography, and Afro-Amerindian interactions in Central America, Colombia, and the Caribbean basin.
At Oberlin I teach a 200-level course on Society and Environment in Latin America and the Caribbean (SELAC). I also teach a 300-level seminar in Political Ecology, a writing advanced course that explores how environmental ideas and outcomes are often linked to global political economies, colonialist assumptions and practices, racial formations, and social injustice.
- ENVS 101 Environment & Society
- ENVS 244 Society and Environment in Latin America and the Caribbean
- ENVS 342 Political Ecology
- Historical and Cultural Geography
- History of Cartography
- African Diaspora
- Latin America
Notes
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Karl Offen Publishes in Journal
January 12, 2020Professor of Environmental Studies Karl Offen published "Subsidy from Nature: Green Sea Turtles in the Colonial Caribbean" in the Journal of Latin American Geography.
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Karl Offen Presents at Environmental History Conference
August 5, 2019Professor of Environmental Studies Karl Offen presented the paper "'Infinitt numbers': Green Sea Turtles in the Colonial Caribbean" at the 3rd World Congress of Environmental History held July 22 to 26, 2019, in Florianópolis, Brazil.
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Karl Offen Presents Conference Paper
July 11, 2019Professor of Environmental Studies Karl Offen presented "Robert Hodgson of the Mosquito Shore: Mapping a Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Imperial Life" at the Omohundro Institute's Early American History Annual Conference at the University of Pittsburgh in June, 2019.
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Karl Offen Presents
December 5, 2017Karl Offen, professor of environmental studies, presented "Environment and Space in Colonial Afro-Latin America" in September for the Department of Geography at Kent State University and in October for the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at the University of Pittsburgh The presentations were a shortened version of a chapter written for the book Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, edited by Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews and slated to publish in 2018 by Cambridge University Press.
The presentations illustrated how environment and space are constitutive of human experience, and they explored how Afro-Latin Americans established important cultural relationships with their environments and transformed abstract spaces into meaningful places in ways that profoundly influenced other dimensions of their lives and those around them.
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Karl Offen Publishes
February 20, 2016Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Karl Offen, along with former colleague Robert Rundstrom, published “Indigenous People and Western Cartography" in Cartography in the Twentieth Century, volume 6 in the History of Cartography Series, edited by Mark Monmonier (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
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Karl Offen Serves as Contributing Guest Editor
October 16, 2015Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Karl Offen was the contributing guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Geography titled “Mapping Latin American Geographies." The table of contents can be viewed on this webpage.