Denis Wood, Bio

Featured on Ira Glass’ This American Life, Denis Wood is one of America’s most sought-after experts on the significance and meaning of maps. Wood loves maps and loves to talk about them. Besides Seeing Through Maps, Wood is the author of the bestseller, The Power of Maps. He also curated the award-winning exhibition of maps at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in 1992, and its even more popular incarnation at the Smithsonian in Washington the year after.

A writer/artist, Wood is also a social scientist. He has published over 60 articles in a variety of journals that range from Industrialization Forum to The Journal of Environmental Psychology. During the ’70s, Wood co-authored the bestselling World Geography Today, and in the ’90s the respected Home Rules. His Five Billion Years of Global Change was published by Guilford Press in 2004 and Making Maps, co-authored with John Krygier, also Guilford Press, was published in 2005.

Dr. Wood earned his Ph.D. and Masters in geography from Clark University, a school with a geography program that is among the most highly regarded in the USA. His undergraduate degree, in English, is from Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, where Wood grew up. Wood’s book about U.S. prisons, My Kind of Time, will be published in 2006. A former educator, Wood taught high school in Worcester, Massachusetts. Later he taught environmental psychology and landscape history for nearly a quarter of a century in the School of Design at North Carolina State University. During the ’90s he was simultaneously a visiting professor at Duke University in the international studies program.

He has lectured around the world. In 1995 he keynoted the annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society and the 2005 Public Participation GIS Conference. His consulting clients have ranged from Esselte Map Services and Maple Lake Sports Camps to Merrill Lynch and Manufacturers Hanover Trust.