Life & Career of Ellen Churchill Semple

Includes manuscripts and notes for three influential books: AMERICAN HISTORY AND ITS GEOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS; INFLUENCES OF GEOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT; THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE MEDITERRANEAN REGION. Also included are reprints of some of Semple's articles, notes for articles, a scrapbook containing news clippings about Semple and reviews of her books, photographs, and maps. Present also are Semple's academic gown, academic hood, and two gold medals: one the Collum Geographic Medal awarded in 1914 by the American Geographical Society of New York, and the other, the Helen Culver Medal, awarded her by the Geographic Society of Chicago in 1931. Also included is a biographical sketch of Semple by Ruth E. Baugh, a fellow geologist. The collection includes her photographs.

The Ellen Churchill Semple photographs (1886-1914; 0.25 cubic feet; 16 items) consists of silver gelatin prints and cabinet cards. Many of the photos are portraits, including two of Semple herself, one of Friedrich Ratzel, and one of famed economist Wilhelm Roscher. Also included is a collection of travel prints from Semple's trip to Java, Indonesia in 1911 and photographs relating to the Cullum Geographical Medal and the Helen Culver Medal.

"Takes an exciting new approach by reading modernism alongside geographical theorists as well as periodicals such as National Geographic. A provocative and revealing account of American modernist poetry in light of the recent 'spatial' turn in literary studies."--Andrew Thacker, coeditor of Geographies of Modernism   "An original book that contributes to major critical conversations in ecocriticism, space and spatiality, geopolitics, and poetry studies. Walsh tells a clear, compelling, and convincing story about geography's role in shaping experimental poetry."--Marsha Bryant, author of Women's Poetry and Popular Culture   The Geopoetics of Modernism is the first book to illuminate the links between American modernism and the geographic discourse of the time. Rebecca Walsh explores Walt Whitman's, Gertrude Stein's, Langston Hughes's, and H.D.'s engagements with contemporary geographic theories and sources--including the cosmological geography of Alexander von Humboldt and Mary Somerville, the environmental determinism of Ellen Churchill Semple, and mainstream textbooks and periodicals--which informed the formal and political dimensions of their work; Walsh argues that the dominant geographic paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave license to experimental writers who were breaking with other forms of authority, enabling them to create transnational forms of belonging on the exhilarating landscape of nations, continents, and the globe. By examining modernism alongside environmental determinist geography, she maps a poetic terrain where binaries such as west versus non-west or imperial center versus colonial periphery are destabilized. The Geopoetics of Modernism reveals the geographic terms through which American modernist poetry interrogated prevailing ideas of orientalism, primitivism, and American exceptionalism.  

PhD. dissertation, College of William and Mary

Ellen Semple's Influences of Geographic Environment (1911) -- a treatise on what would later be called environmental determinism -- coincided with the emergence of geography as an independent academic discipline in North America and Britain. Highly controversial and written by one of America's first female professional geographers, it was considered by some a monument to Semple's scholarship and erudition, while for others it was conceptually flawed. And yet its influence on the development and direction of the new discipline of geography was profound. Innes Keighren explains why Influences... was encountered differently by different people, at different times and in different places, and reveals why the book aroused the passions it did. The result is a pioneering work that provides a wholesale re-visioning of the way in which geographical knowledge is disseminated.

Biographical article in the American National Biography by Oxford University Press

PhD. dissertation, St. Louis University

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 23(4): 229-240.
Professional biography of E.C. Semple.