SGDE Classroom Dedication in Jan Monk's Honor
On Friday, April 10, 2026, the School of Geography, Development & Environment gathered with students, faculty, staff, and guests to honor the late Dr. Janice Monk with the dedication of an SGDE classroom, S445, now known as the Jan Monk Room.
In Memory of Our Friend, Jan....
Jan Monk passed away peacefully on July 12, 2024. The geographical community worldwide grieved someone who has made a transformative impact on the discipline. Over a career spanning 11 books and 90 articles, book chapters, and other essays, Jan Monk made ground breaking contributions to the development of feminist geographic theory and methodology; to analyses that recover women-identified geographers’ social histories as they worked their way through a patriarchal discipline; to geographic education and curriculum development; and to our understandings of the Southwest. In ways both visible and less visible, Jan Monk spent decades advocating and supporting women in geography both in the U.S. and globally—maintaining for example an extensive, multi-lingual international bibliography of gender and feminist geography that she sent out annually to counteract the colonial silos that prevented transnational engagements. From serving as the AAG’s 7th female president, to her tireless work with the International Geographical Union’s Committee on Gender and Geography, Jan Monk was a leader in our field while always remaining accessible to young scholars and went out of her way to mentor and support underrepresented groups in the discipline.
SBS Dean Dr. Lori Poloni-Staudinger's welcome remarks...
Good afternoon,
Thank you for being here today. It is an honor to join you in recognizing and celebrating the life and legacy of Jan Monk, and her extraordinary and lasting contributions to the University of Arizona, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the discipline of geography, and generations of students and scholars whose lives she shaped.
Jan Monk was an internationally respected scholar, a pioneering feminist geographer, a gifted mentor, and a builder of institutions and intellectual communities. Her scholarship helped reshape how we understand the relationship between gender, place, and social structures. She was among those who insisted that if we are to understand the world fully, we must pay attention to whose experiences are centered, whose stories are told, and whose lives are too often overlooked.
That work may now feel foundational, but it was not always so. Jan helped make it possible.
She challenged her discipline to think more broadly, more critically, and more inclusively. She expanded what counted as important scholarship, and in doing so, she helped open space for new questions, new voices, and new ways of seeing.
And perhaps that is one of the most remarkable things about Jan: she did not simply contribute to a field. She helped change it.
Jan once said that she hoped for “a geography that is enriched by and more responsive than it has historically been to diversity” and for institutions and knowledge that are “consciously inclusive.” That vision was not abstract for her. It was not simply a statement of values. It was the animating force of her life’s work.
At the University of Arizona, Jan found and helped create an academic home where that vision could take root and flourish. Through her work with the Southwest Institute for Research on Women, through her deep engagement with geography, and through her enduring commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship, she helped build the intellectual foundations for work that connected gender, place, equity, and social justice.
She was instrumental in strengthening the kinds of scholarship and teaching that asked hard questions about inequality, representation, power, and opportunity. In doing so, she helped shape the intellectual life of the University of Arizona and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences into places where interdisciplinary work on these issues could not only exist, but thrive.
That is a profound institutional legacy.
But to speak only of Jan’s scholarship would be to tell only part of the story.
Because Jan Monk was not simply a brilliant thinker. She was also, by every account, an extraordinary mentor and a deeply generous colleague, one that I wish I could have known.
She cared deeply about students, about emerging scholars, and especially about those trying to find their place in academic spaces that had not always welcomed them. She understood that talent alone is not always enough. She understood that institutions can either widen opportunity or narrow it. And she devoted an enormous amount of her time and energy to making sure that others, especially women and younger scholars, had the encouragement, guidance, and support they needed to flourish.
Many who remember Jan speak not only of her intellect, but of her generosity, her warmth, and her directness. She was known for asking thoughtful questions, for listening carefully, and for offering the kind of advice that was honest, wise, and deeply consequential. She helped people imagine futures for themselves that they might not yet have been able to see.
That is a rare and lasting kind of influence.
Her impact also extended far beyond this campus. Jan was a truly international scholar and connector of people and ideas. She built intellectual and professional networks that stretched across continents and across generations. She helped create spaces where scholars from different places, traditions, and experiences could learn from one another and contribute to a richer, more inclusive understanding of geography and of the world.
One tribute described her as someone who “connected people and places,” and another used a particularly beautiful phrase, calling her a “seed-woman,” someone who left behind seeds of knowledge and possibility that continue to grow in places far beyond where she first planted them.
Because Jan’s legacy is not only in the books she wrote, the lectures she gave, or the honors she received, though those were many and significant. Her legacy is also in what she helped others build. It is in the scholars she encouraged. It is in the fields she helped legitimize. It is in the questions people now feel empowered to ask because she made those questions visible and worthy of serious attention.
And it is also in the way she modeled a life of intellectual courage.
Jan’s own professional path was not always easy. She experienced firsthand some of the barriers and exclusions that women in academia faced and continue to face. But rather than allowing those experiences to diminish her, she transformed them into a deeper commitment to making academic life more just, more humane, and more expansive for others.
That, too, is part of what we honor today.
For all she gave to this university, to the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, to her field, and to so many people across the world, we are deeply grateful.
I am grateful to be here with you as we honor Jan Monk and her enduring contributions to the University of Arizona throughout this event.
Thank you.
SGDE Director Dr. Keith Woodward introduces the 21st Annual Jan Monk Lecturer, Dr. Beverley Mullings: Professor, Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto...
Our Jan Monk Lecturer this year, Dr. Beverley Mullings, is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, who embodies many of the values and characteristics of Jan Monk—she has made outstanding scholarly contributions to economic, feminist and anti-racist geographies. Moreover, Dr. Mullings is a profoundly caring professional who has mentored over many years students and junior faculty in the Caribbean, United States and Canada.
Dr. Mullings’ research examines the ways capitalist regimes are transforming livelihoods and social reproduction for racialized communities in the majority world. Her contributions have been multifold, including her recent 2022 work on how the financialization of Caribbean remittance economies has led to the dispossession of capital so critical to the social reproduction of racialized and marginalized communities. Her 1999 article on the dilemmas of interiewing in cross-cultural settings was deeply infuential in my own work; it is an article I have assigned in every advanced methods class I have taught over the last twenty years.
Like Jan Monk over the course of her career, Dr. Mullings is recognized for her mentoring skills and is known for the care and compassion she brings to everyday engagements with students and colleagues. In 2017 these commitments were recognized when she received the Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award from the AAG. In 2020 she was co-recipient of the Ban Righ Foundation Mentorship Award. She also has a long-standing commitment to questions of mental health in the academy, and currently co-chairs the AAG Mental Health and the Academy Affinity Group.
Jan's publications....
Publications about Jan...
In Memoriam: Janice E. J. Monk (1937–2024)
- Diana Liverman, Chris Lukinbeal & Ann M. Oberhauser (06 Oct 2025): In Memoriam: Janice E. J. Monk (1937–2024), Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2025.2559547
- Monk, Janice and Allen, Casey D. (2024) "The Deviant Geographer," The Geographical Bulletin: Vol. 62: Iss. 1, Article 9. Available at: https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/thegeographicalbulletin/vol62/iss1/9
