Dr. Jamey Essex

•  Professor, 2020-now
• Associate Professor, 2010-2020
• Assistant Professor, 2005-2010
• Ph.D., Geography, Syracuse University, 2005
• M.A., Geography, Syracuse University, 2001
• B.A., Geography and History, University of Kentucky, 1999

My primary research focus has long been official development assistance, specifically those state institutions that handle donor countries’ aid and development policies, both how they promote development and foreign policy, and their own internal structures and external relations. I have published work on the geopolitics of food security, ideas about aid effectiveness, and the restructuring of aid and foreign policy agencies in the US and Canada. My most recent work on this has looked at mergers between development and diplomatic institutions, how these agencies assess, manage, and mitigate risk and hardship in personnel management systems, and how these systems reflect and shape geopolitical logic and diplomatic and development practice. I have more general interests in the geographies of state power and bureaucratic expertise and the spatial organization of food systems. Two main lines of ongoing and future research emerge from this.

First, I am turning my attention to the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID. Overlapping ecological and economic crises, the slow demise of neoliberalism, the growing weight of non-Western donors, and the emergence of both reactionary right-wing populism and AI technologies have ignited new tensions around foreign aid. Understanding the reasons and means by which USAID was targeted and taken apart provides a useful entry point for examining the several trends reshaping the global aid system’s institutional structures, its internal practices and flows, and its ideological and political purposes and logics. Does this suggest the US is abandoning “soft power” strategies, and what would this mean for recalibrating the relationship between geopolitical and geoeconomic logics and strategies?   

Second, I am interested in both the intellectual history of agricultural geography and rural planning and the development and transformation of food systems. In line with this and past work on food security, US food and aid policies, and the cultivation and organization of expertise in state institutions, I am slowly working to understand the social and political construction of rural places and spaces in North America. One component of this is historical, focused on the underexamined life and legacy of Oliver Baker, an academic geographer and an expert and official in the US Department of Agriculture during the New Deal. Baker’s academic and policy work, peppered with ideas about race, national prosperity, and cultural change, strongly shaped how later geographers have understood the spatial and scalar dynamics of industrial agriculture, the rural-urban relationship, and regional planning during a pivotal period in the development of both geography and US policy. Beyond this more focused examination of Baker’s work is a broader interest in the framing of rural spaces and places in American and Canadian political, economic, and cultural imaginations amid resurgent nationalism and profound shifts in the global political economy.

• POLS 1600   Intro to International Relations
• POLS 2300   Space, Place, and Scale: Foundations of Human Geography
• POLS 2490   Political Economy of Agriculture and Food
• POLS 3350   Political Geography
• POLS 3560   Theories of International Political Economy
• POLS 4970/4980   Political Science Thesis
• POLS 8010   International Relations Theory

Books

• Essex, Jamey. Development, Security, and Aid: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics at the US Agency for International Development. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013.

Articles, chapters, and other contributions

• Essex, J. (2025) “Diagnosing American decline: The geopolitics of Havana syndrome.” Geopolitics, 30 (5): 2073-2094, doi: 10.1080/14650045.2025.2468770.
•  Essex, J. (2024) “Coming in from the cold: Arctic Council debate simulation and the political geographies of a global region.” The Geography Teacher, 21 (3): 106-112, doi: 10.1080/19338341.2024.2379346.
• Essex, J. (2024) “The kids are not alright: Children as objects, audience, and agents in the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests.” Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes, 68 (3): 418-429, doi: 10.1111/cag.12909.
• Essex, J., C. Gallaher, and J. Luger. (2024) “Introduction – Worldbuilding and Worldbreaking: New Spatialities of the Far-Right.” Antipode Online, https://antipodeonline.org/2024/12/12/new-spatialities-of-the-far-right/; part of symposium on Antipode Online edited by J. Essex, C. Gallaher, and J. Luger.
• Essex, J. (2023) “‘The apartment above a meth lab’?: Participation in and impacts of the 2020 US election in Canada.” In B. Warf and J. Heppen (eds.), Geographies of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. New York: Routledge, 137-153, doi: 10.4324/9781003260837-9.
• Essex, J. and J. Bowman. (2022) “From the Green Zone to Havana Syndrome: Making geographic sense of rotationality and hardship in diplomacy.” Diplomatica, 4 (1): 74-99, doi: 10.1163/25891774-bja10061.
• Essex, J. and J. Bowman. (2021) “Striped pants and Birkenstocks: Work culture, gender, and clothing at Global Affairs Canada.” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 23 (2): 309-329, doi: 10.1080/14616742.2020.1724814.
• Essex, Jamey, Lauren Stokes, and Ilkin Yusibov. (2019) “Geographies of diplomatic labor: Institutional culture, state work, and Canada’s foreign service.” Political Geography, 72: 10-19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.03.005.
• Essex, Jamey and Logan Carmichael. “Restructuring development expertise and labour in the CIDA-DFAIT merger.” The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 61(2), 266-278, 2017. doi: 10.1111/cag.12328.
• Essex, Jamey. “Aid.” In N. Castree, M. Goodchlild, A. Kobayashi, W. Liu, D. Marston, and D. Richardson (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. Hoboken, NJ and Washington, DC: Wiley-Blackwell and the American Association of Geographers, 2017. doi: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0458.
• Essex, Jamey. “International development institutions and the challenges of urbanization: The case of Jakarta.” Development in Practice, 26(3), 346-359, 2016. doi: 10.1080/09614524.2016.1150966.
• Essex, Jamey. “The neoliberalization of agriculture: Regimes, resistance, and resilience.” In S. Springer, K. Birch, and J. MacLeavy (eds.), The Handbook of Neoliberalism. New York: Routledge, 514-525, 2016.
• Essex, Jamey. “From the global food crisis to the age of austerity: The anxious geopolitics of global food security.” Geopolitics, 19(2), 266-290, 2014. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2014.896795.
• Le Billon, Philippe, Melanie Sommerville, and Jamey. Essex. “Introduction: Global Food Crisis.” Geopolitics, 19(2), 235-238, 2014. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2014.920231.
• Sommerville, Melanie, Jamey Essex, and Philippe Le Billon. “The ‘global food crisis’ and the geopolitics of global food security.” Geopolitics, 19(2), 239-265, 2014. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2013.811641.
• Essex, Jamey. “Idle hands are the devil’s tools: The geopolitics and geoeconomics of hunger.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(1), 191-207, 2012. doi: 10.1080.00045608.2011.595966.
• Essex, Jamey. “The politics of effectiveness in Canada’s international development assistance.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 33(3), 338-355, 2012. doi: 10.1080/02255189.2012.713856.