AUSTIN, Texas—The Department of Geography at The University of Texas at Austin will host for the first time the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers (CLAG) Jan. 6-7, 2000 in the Thompson Conference Center.
CLAG was organized in 1970 to foster geographic education and research on Latin America. The UT geography department is the headquarters for the organization which, in addition to holding national and international conferences and publishing a newsletter, produces the refereed journal, Yearbook of the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers. The conference also is being sponsored by the UniversityÌs Institute of Latin American Studies and the College of Liberal Arts.
This yearÌs conference will feature a keynote address by Dr. Karl Butzer, who holds the Raymond Dickson Centennial Professorship at UT. Butzer, who also is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, will speak on the theme “The Past and the Present.” A special award for furthering inter-american contacts between geographers will go to Dr. Hildegardo Cordova of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, a noted professor at that institution who also holds a masterÌs degree from UT. Other sessions and talks will showcase the work of UT faculty and graduate students studying environmental, cultural and development issues in Latin America.
The meeting will include two field trips, one to northern Mexico to view sites related to Butzer’s Environmental History of Northern Mexico project and another led by Dr. William Doolittle to San Antonio to view 18th-century irrigation systems and their effect on the morphology of the present-day city. The program is online at http://www.utexas.edu/depts/grg/office/events/clag/program.html.
