Geography

Brad's training is in the historical geography of agricultural settlement and U.S. federal Indian policy, especially as it operated in what became Oklahoma during the allotment era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has examined the political geography of tax-exempt status retailing in Indian country and the interactions of tribal governments and state governments. Since arriving at OSU, Brad has worked with geographic education initiatives and he has often contracted with the state to identify and record Oklahoma's architecturally and historically significant buildings.

Research Interests:
Brad's research uses a landscape and historical GIS approach to examine Oklahoma's agricultural evolution. A native of the waning eastern margin of the Winter Wheat Belt, he documents twentieth century agricultural change at the local scale from a time of peak rural population density, when animal-powered general farming was the rule, across a century of mechanization and regional specialization, and ultimately agro-industrialization and the retirement of marginal lands. He is interested in gauging the local scale and short term decisions that drive agricultural intensification and in turn affect patterns of regional specialization.

I am a broadly trained cultural-historical geographer with regional expertise in Australia and diverse interests related to geography and global studies. My research focuses primarily on cultural landscapes, including how they are represented, change over time, are contested, and reflect and reinforce power.

My research often intersects with aspects of globalization, ethnic geography, religion, gentrification, place-making, and geographic education. I have worked on numerous historic preservation projects and have provided leadership to a collaborative team that prepared resource management plans for state parks. I am especially interested in landscapes of the New Deal, Depression-era art, agro-industrial landscapes, necrogeography (such as cultural practices associated with cemeteries and green burials), and the history of geography.

I have emergent interests in political iconography and the digital humanities. See my co-edited volume, Companion to the American Landscape. Other research projects in progress include a project on Ellen Churchill Semple, monuments to women. and historical examination of landscape change related to malaria control in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Research Interests:

Cultural and Historical Geography
Global Studies
History of Geography
The New Deal (WPA, CCC, etc.)
Historic Preservation & Folk Architecture
Necrogeography
Europe
Australia/Pacific

I am a cultural geographer with research interests in food, wine, and sense of place.

I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Oklahoma State University. Before joining OSU, I worked as a postdoc research fellow in the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University and the Department of Geography at Kent State University. My research interests focus on leveraging multi-source geospatial big data (e.g., remote sensing images, Google Street View images, geolocated social media data, and smartphone users' mobility data) and advanced spatial statistical and GeoAI (Geospatial Artificial Intelligence) models to address pressing challenges in population health and environmental health, such as health disparities and heat vulnerabilities. I have published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles with 5 ESI Highly Cited papers (top 1%). My research are supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP).

Research Interests:

GIS, Geospatial Big Data Analytics, Spatial Epidemiology, GeoHealth, GeoAI (Geospatial Artificial Intelligence), Environmental Health, Human Mobility, Location-based Social Media Analytics.

Dr. Wheeler holds degrees in English (BA), International Museum Studies (MA), Forced Migration (MA), and Geography (PhD) from institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Africa. She has engaged her interests and concern with matters of responsibility, repatriation, historical and environmental justice, death-and-dying work, and the future of environmental migration in various research, teaching, editing, and project-based work.

Brittany has taught widely on themes of human-environment relationships, migration, global and local responsibility, research methodology, museums, and courses that introduce students to the world through various scales of geographic focus. She has taught all levels of university coursework, in multiple formats (large lecture, small seminar, one-on-one supervision, discussion labs). At OSU, she has taught Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, Introduction to Cultural Geography, Mixed Methods in Field Research, and Field Techniques and Geodata Collection. At other institutions she has taught Geographies of Responsibility & Repair, Climate Migration, Global Movements: Migrations, Refugees, and Diasporas, World Regional Geography, Human Geography, Global Geography, and Africa.

Her research focus has centered primarily around the moral and legal facets of displacement, compensation, and mobility as they have affected, challenged, and been contested by islanders and stakeholders based in the global oceanic south and diasporic communities (with particular focus on the Chagos and the Marshall Islands). Prior to her doctorate, her research has focused on collection history and tribal liaison in museums in service of repatriation, environmental migration in the context of the U.S.-Marshallese relationship, and the repatriation of the deceased from Johannesburg, South Africa to other African countries and cities.

I joined Oklahoma State University in January 2025 as a Visiting Assistant Professor, teaching Meteorology and Introduction to Physical Geography. My research interests include applied climatology, climate change, physical geography, climate modeling, atmospheric dynamics, severe weather prediction, and GIS-based analyses of climate–agriculture relationships.

My educational background spans environmental science, agriculture, GIS, and climatology. My academic training includes coursework in environmental chemistry, crop science, and physical climatology. My enthusiasm for environmental studies began in middle school, when I was first introduced to fundamental environmental concepts and became deeply drawn to the beauty and complexity of the natural world.

Throughout my academic training, I have gained substantial hands-on experience through work on university farms, including crop planting, soil management, and monitoring plant damage associated with severe weather events. These practical experiences have strongly shaped my research perspective and interests.

My current research uses observational climate datasets and climate model outputs to analyze historical freeze events in the Midwest and Northeast United States and to assess the potential changes in freeze frequency and intensity under future climate scenarios.