Joseph P Hupy - UWEC Geography Department

Research Interests

Research Interests

Although my research interests within geography are broad, my particular interests center on the many untapped aspects of military geography. In addition I prefer to focus my research on human-environment relationships, regional geography, and soil geomorphology. In the broadest sense, I prefer to focus on research within the physical realm that contains a significant human-environment interaction component. This, in my opinion, is the essence of military geography.

 

My dissertation research examined the interactions between warfare and the physical environment. While a large body of literature exists on the how the physical environment influences battle, a limited amount of research has explored the inverse relationship, that is, the various effects of warfare upon the environment. As a PhD student, I examined landscape disturbance and post-disturbance landscape recovery on the World War I battlefield of Verdun, France. I continue to hold an interest in this form of research and have expanded beyond France by examining other battlefields around the world. I am currently working in and around the Khe Sanh battlefield in Vietnam. My wife, Christina Hupy, is also a faculty member here at UWEc. She worked on the Vietnam battlefield with me and is interested in the Remote Sensing component of this work. Not only am I looking at that landscape in terms of recovery, I’m also trying to construct a GIS historical database by gathering information from veterans of that particular battle.