Shiloh Krupar

Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor

Georgetown University School of Foreign Service

Shiloh Krupar is a Geographer and Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University, where she currently serves as Field Chair of the Program in Culture and Politics in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California-Berkeley, an MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford University, and a BA from Case Western Reserve University. Her teaching and research interests, which span geography, architecture, performance studies, the medical humanities, and environmental justice, have explored several interrelated areas: military landscapes, such as decommissioned military sites and nuclear facilities; model cities and urban-environmental projects in China; cities in aftermath and the impacts of environmental, juridical, and financial disasters on the urban environment; and, lastly, biomedicine, specifically environmental biomonitoring, medical hot spotting, and medical geographies of waste. The recipient of a Quadrant Fellowship, her book Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) explores the politics of nature conservation, environmental memory, contamination and compensation issues at decommissioned military sites in the western United States. She is currently working on one solo book project and two co-authored volumes: What Remains—The Unseen Medical Geographies of Waste; Waste Complex: Capital, Ecology, Sovereignty (with C. Greig Crysler, University of California-Berkeley); and Deadly Life-making: US Biocultures and the Ethics of Living On (with Nadine Ehlers, University of Sydney). Krupar has been published in such venues as Society and Space, Antipode, Public Culture, Radical History Review, Configurations, Liminalities, cultural geographies, Medicine, Conflict and Survival, Occasion, and Progress in Human Geography. The 2012 SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory includes her co-authored chapter (with Stefan Al, University of Pennsylvania) on theories of spectacle and branding. Her collaborative long-term art project “The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service” (with Sarah Kanouse, Northeastern University) works at the intersection of art, research, and government policy to address the toxic afterlife of U.S. militarism and has been included in the Institute for Wishful Thinking (NYC, 2011), “Ecocultures” exhibition (George Mason University, 2011), Figure One Gallery (Champaign, IL, 2013), and is a Finalist in the traveling show “Monument to Cold War Victory” during 2014-17 (Cooper Union, NYC, October 2014; Wende Museum, Los Angeles, 2017). Krupar travels extensively to give lectures and performances, at the University of St. Andrews, the Royal Geographical Society in London, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study’s workshop “Space, Power, Nation,” the Montreal-based Artivistic Conference “Un.Occupied Spaces,” and the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers and the American Studies Association. As a member of the CULP core faculty, Professor Krupar teaches the courses “Theorizing Culture and Politics,” “Green Politics,” “Detouring the Global City,” “Introduction to Critical Geography,” “Cartography and Social Justice,” and other offerings on cultures of exhibition, and landscape as an aesthetic object, political-economic artifact and social practice. She has worked collaboratively with The Phillips Collection to develop an institutional partnership and innovative new course on “Globalization, Diplomacy, and the Politics of Exhibitions.”