Political Science Faculty and Staff
Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail)
Professor, Government and International Affairs and Director, Masters of Public and International Affairs (Northern Capital Region Campus)
Ph.D., Syracus University, 1989
Ph.D., Syracus University, 1989
Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail), (PhD, Syracuse University, 1989), Professor of Government and International Affairs and Director of the Masters of Public and International Affairs program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's National Capital Region campus in Alexandria.
Dr. Toal grew up in the border region between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. He received a B.A. in History and Geography from National University of Ireland, Maynooth with First Class Honours in 1982. He obtained a M.A. in Geography from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Political Geography from Syracuse University in 1989. Dr John Agnew, current Professor of Geography at University of California Los Angeles, was his academic supervisor advisor. Toal has held fellowships at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, and the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. In 2005 he testified before the United States Congress on political developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Toal's research specializations include critical geopolitics, nationalism, political geography, post-Communism, and globalization. He conducts research in Washington DC, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the North Caucuses region. Ó Tuathail has been a founding figure in establishing Critical Geopolitics as a domain of research within political geography and international relations. He is one of the contemporary geographers featured in the 2004 book Key Thinkers in Space and Place . His latest work is The Geopolitics Reader (second edition, 2006). He is completing a manuscript entitled Reversing Ethnic Cleansing: Population Displacement and Return in Bosnia-Herzegovina , co-authored with Dr Carl Dahlman (a former Virginia Tech student) that pulls together his research on the returns process in that country since 2002. Professor Toal is an associate editor of Geopolitics and Eurasian Geography and Economics, as well as an editorial board member of Political Geography . He is the editor and author of six books: G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge, A Geopolitics Reader , Second edition. Routledge, 2006; J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal, eds., A Companion to Political Geography , Blackwell, 2004; S. Dalby and G. Ó Tuathail, eds., Rethinking Geopolitics , Routledge, 1998; G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge, A Geopolitics Reader, First edition. Routledge, 1998; A. Herod, G. Ó Tuathail and S. Roberts, eds. An Unruly World? Geography, Globalization and Governance , Routledge, 1998; and, G. Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Volume 6 in the Borderlines series) and London: Routledge, 1996. He is also the author of over 40 peer reviewed articles, some of which are available on his personal web site www.toal.net.
Email: Gerard Toal