By way of introduction

I am the President & Head Curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. I am a historical geographer and my work investigates changes to the built and natural landscape of New England.

I was born in Massachusetts and have lived in Nashua, New Hampshire; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Tiranë, Albania; Nottingham, England; Madison, Wisconsin; Lebanon, New Hampshire; Dorchester, Massachusetts; and now Melrose, Massachusetts, with my children Zana and Cyrus and my wife Lihlani Skipper Nelson the Deputy Director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School.

Curriculum vitæ

Download a PDF of my full academic CV (Last update 2024-04-20)

Academic employment

Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts. President & Head Curator (July 2021–Present); Curator of Maps & Director of Geographic Scholarship (September 2019–July 2021).
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, September 2016 – August 2019. Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography and Society of Fellows.

Education

University Of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, September 2011 – August 2016. PhD in Geography; minor in Culture, History, and Environment. Advisor: William Cronon; Committee: Anna Andrzejewski, Jennifer Ratner–Rosenhagen, Matthew Turner, Keith Woodward.
University Of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom, September 2010 – September 2011. Awarded MA with Distinction in Landscape and Culture, School of Geography, December 2011. Advisors: Charles Watkins and Susanne Seymour. Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar.
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 2005 – June 2009. Awarded AB summa cum laude in Social Studies, June 2009. Secondary field in Visual and Environmental Studies.
Nashua High School North, Nashua, New Hampshire, September 2001 – June 2005.

Peer-reviewed publications

Garrett Dash Nelson and Ryan McKeon, 2018. “Peaks of People: Utilizing Topographic Prominence to Measure the Ranked Significance of Population Centers,” The Professional Geographer (accepted, in typesetting). doi:10.1080/00330124.2018.1531039
Garrett Dash Nelson, 2018. “Mosaic and Tapestry: Metaphors as Geographical Concept Generators,” Progress in Human Geography. doi:10.1007/BF00131171
Alasdair Rae and Garrett Dash Nelson, 2018. “From ‘Big Data’ to Big Regions: The Geography of the American Commute,” in LA Schintler and Z Chen, eds., Big Data for Regional Science (London: Routledge).
Rebecca Summer and Garrett Dash Nelson, 2017. “Making Stories Significant: Possibilities and Challenges at the Intersection of Digital Methods and Historic Preservation,” Area. doi:10.1111/area.12395
Garrett Dash Nelson and Alasdair Rae, 2016. “A New Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions,” PLoS One 11(11):e0166083. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0166083
- Featured in the PLoS One 10th Anniversary Datasets. See media coverage in the Washington Post, CityLab, National Geographic, and elsewhere.
Garrett Dash Nelson, 2016. “Making the Single City: The Constitutive Landscape and the Struggle for Greater Boston, 1891–1911,” Landscape Research 42(3): 243–255, special issue on “Landscape Histories of Urbanization” doi:10.1080/01426397.2016.1267130
Garrett Dash Nelson, 2015. “Walking and talking through Walks and Talks: Traveling in the English landscape with Frederick Law Olmsted, 1850 and 2011,” Journal of Historical Geography 48: 47–57. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2015.02.004

Book reviews

“William Rankin, After the Map,” Historical Geography 45 (2017).
“Benjamin Looker, A Nation of Neighborhoods,” Journal of Historical Geography 56 (2017): 148–149. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2016.12.007
“John Stilgoe, What is Landscape?” Historical Geography 44 (2016).
“Steven Conn, Americans Against the City.” Journal of Historical Geography 53 (2016): 120–121. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2015.10.018
“Jo Guldi, Roads to Power,” Historical Geography 42 (December 2014): 405–406.

Other publications

“How Boston Dreamed of its Future, a Century Ago.” Boston Sunday Globe (Ideas section, January 4, 2015).
“‘Nature Led the Way:’ The Legacy of City Planner John Nolen.” Book interview with R. Bruce Stephenson. Edge Effects (August 4, 2015).
“Planning With the People: Jess Gilbert on the ‘Intended’ New Deal.” Book interview with Jess Gilbert. Edge Effects (April 2, 2015).
“Review Essay: Taking the Long View.” Edge Effects (November 20, 2015).

Grants and awards

University Fellowship. University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2011–16. Two-year nonsequential research fellowship that supports highly-qualified doctoral students.
Summer Writing Fellowship. Mellon Foundation, 2015.
Humanities Exchange (HEX). Center for the Humanities, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2014–15. Joint award with Rebecca Summer. Public outreach grant for developing humanities projects in collaboration with community organizations.
Postgraduate Travel Bursary. Historical Geography Research Group, RGS–IBG, 2015.
Vilas Research Travel Grant. Graduate School, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2014.
Research & Travel Grant. Center for Culture, History, and Environment, 2014 and 2013.
Trewartha Conference Travel Grant. Department of Geography, 2014 and 2013.
Trewartha Research Travel Grant. Department of Geography, 2014.
Clarence W. Olmstead Citizenship Award. Department of Geography, 2013.
Robert S. Birch Student Travel Award. Society for American City & Regional Planning History, 2011.
Vilas Welcome Award. Graduate School, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2011.
Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar. US–UK Fulbright Commission, 2010–11. Funded MA program, with emphasis on scholarly cultural exchange.
Occasional Lecture Fund. British Fulbright Scholars Association, 2011.
George Peabody Gardner Traveling Fellowship. Harvard College, 2009–10. Grant awarded to one Harvard senior to pursue an independent project in an understudied country. Funded nine months of research in Albania on the changes in planning and spatial organization from communism to capitalism.
Phi Beta Kappa. Harvard Colleg, Alpha and Iota of Massachusetts, 2008.
Harvard College Research Program. Summer research grant, 2008.
Detur Prize. Harvard College, 2006.

Teaching and project assistantships

Project Assistant, Center for Culture, History, and Environment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, August 2013 – June 2015.
Guest Lecturer, “Thinking historically with GIS,” Geography 307: Introduction to GIS, March 2015.
Teaching Assistant, Geography/Environmental Studies 339: Environmental Conservation, Spring 2013. Professors Matthew Turner and Lisa Naughton
Teaching Assistant, History/Geography/Environmental Studies 460: American Environmental History, Fall 2012.

Presentations and conferences

[Society for American City and Regional Planning History], November 2015. Presenting “Landscape, Progressivism and the remaking of society and state power in the early twentieth century.”
Land and Water: A Long-Term Perspective, September 2015. Presented “Territorialization on the Left.”
International Conference of Historical Geographers, July 2015. Organized, with Peter Ekman, doube session “Distributed landscapes: Histories of centers and edges in American planning.”
Association of American Geographers, April 2015. Organized session “Region, landscape, and time: geographic construction in historical ”; Presented “Making the single city:
Relational Landscape Studies of Urbanization, June 2014, SLU-Alnarp, Sweden. Presented Stitching togehter a metropolis: The constituting landscape in Sylvester Baxter’s Boston.
American Society For Environmental History, March 2014. Delegate to the “Digital Environmental History” pre-conference workshop.
Dimensions Of Political Ecology, February 2014. Presented “It shows what ought to be”: Benton MacKaye and the ‘geotechnics’ of the planned state.
Social Science History Association, November 2013. Presented The instructive landscape: Social reform and environmental thought in the Progressive Era.
American Society For Environmental History, March 2012. Attended; graduate student volunteer.
Society For American City And Regional Planning History, November 2011. Presented Civilization and Communicativeness: Social Theory of Frederick Law Olmsted.
Museum Of English Rural Life, Seminar Series, 22 Feburary 2011. Presented Transatlantic traffic in rural imaginations. Sponsored by British Fubright Scholars Association Occassional Lecture Fund.
Rural History, September 2010. Attended.

Programming, Design, and Languages

Programming languages. HTML(5), PHP, CSS, JavaScript, Python, D3.js, *nix shell.
Geospatial software. QGIS, gdal, Arc suite, Leaflet, Spatialite
Design software. Adobe CC suite, Final Cut Pro
Other software. Microsoft Office suite, Apple Pages and Numbers, MySQL
Human languages. English (native), Albanian (intermediate). Formerly studied Arabic and Latin.

Affiliations

Association of American Geographers (Specialty groups: Historical Geography, Cultural Geography, Landscape, Regional Development and Planning, Graduate)
Historical Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society with IBG
Society for American City and Regional Planning History
Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), University of Wisconsin–Madison

Selected work

See CV for major publications.

Interactive projects

Megaregions of the US. Visualization of the 2016 PLoS One megaregions study included in the Places & Spaces "Macroscopes" exhibit.
Goodman to Garver. Interactive public history portal on the changing landscape of a former industrial site.
Madison Architectural History Viewer. Web tool for showing residential properties in Madison based on build date and architectural style.
Propinquity Voting. Data analysis and mapping tool to show how a "borderless" form of environmental governance might operate.