Beginning in 1837, Mount Holyoke founder Mary Lyon listed geography among the prerequisites for the entering class.
Geography serves as a bridge between the physical and the cultural worlds as an integrated discipline that studies the relationships between people, places, societies, and the environment. Human geography (a social science) is concerned especially with the political, economic, social, and cultural processes and resource practices that give definition to particular places and spaces. Physical geography (a natural science) focuses on the physical processes that shape the patterns of the earth’s surface, including landforms, climate, and ecosystems. Geography also examines the science of earth systems, the human dimensions of global environmental and climate change, and the use of geographic information science (GIS) and remote sensing techniques to represent and analyze data and knowledge at different spatial scales.
Geography is an interdisciplinary field comprised of two branches; physical and human geography that integrate various academic disciplines from the social sciences and the natural sciences. Holistic synthesis encourages geographers to think across space and place through a variety of scholarly lenses.
Atmosphere
Biosphere
Cartography
Cultural apparatus
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Geography
Geopolitics
Geospatial Technologies
Geosystems
Global
Globalization
Hydrosphere
Interdependence
Lithosphere
Local
Migration
Place
Remote sensing
Scale
Space
Spatial diffusion
Time/Temporal
Urbanization
The geography department at Mount Holyoke integrates both human and physical geography into its program and is located in Clapp Laboratory.
This guide was created through the collaborative work of April L. Graham FP'18, Caro Pinto, Julie Adamo, Mary Stettner, Dr. Mary Glackin, and Dr. Serin D. Houston.