Harold H. McCarty

Born and raised in Iowa, McCarty entered the University of Iowa College of Commerce in 1919 as an undergraduate. In 1923, after receiving his Bachelor's of Science degree in Economics, McCarty went on to teach in the College of Commerce as a graduate instructor, namely Commercial Geography, which he began teaching in 1924. In 1925, McCarty received his Master of Arts and, in 1929, his Ph. D. in Economics followed suit. By the proceeding fall semester, he was teaching all five sections of Commercial Geography. McCarty was the first Chair of the Department, from 1946 to 1968. During his life, also published books such as The Geographic Basis of American Economic Life in 1940 and The Measurement of Association in Industrial Geography in 1956, among many others. After his passing in 1987, the Harold H. McCarty Memorial Fund was established in his honor to support undergraduate and graduate students pursue their academic endeavors. 

Fred K. Schaefer

A geographer and pioneer of the quantitative revolution, Fred Schaefer was a member of University faculty from 1946 to 1953. Born in Germany, Schaefer attended the University of Berlin for both his undergraduate studies in economic and political geography as well as his graduate studies in mathematics and population statistics. Escaping fascism in Europe as a political refugee, he emigrated to the United States. In Iowa, Schaefer settled down at the Scattergood Rehabilitation Center, a Quaker settlement located fifteen miles east of Iowa City, before he became a part-time instructor for the College of Commerce. He later went on to become an inaugural member of the Department of Geography. Schaefer taught classes such as Economics of Modern Dictatorships, Commercial Geography of Europe, and Political Geography, Economic Geography of Asia and the Pacific, among others.

His article, "Exceptionalism in Geography: A Methodological Examination", published posthumously in a 1953 volume of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, was, in Schaefer's words, his "reason for existence in geography" and served as his written argument for the classification of geography as a science, based upon the search for geographic laws. It soon became a work behind which younger generations of economic geographers rallied to push for a reinvention of the discipline as a science, known as spatial science.

Clyde F. Kohn

In 1958, the Geography Department recruited Clyde F. Kohn from Northwestern University. Previously, Kohn had been a Harvard instructor, where he served as a Lecturer between 1942 and 1945 before moving to Illinois and teaching at Northwestern for ten years. At the time of his recruitment to the University of Iowa, Kohn had recently published a book with Harold Mayer, titled Readings in Urban Geography. Kohn taught Urban Geography, Social Geography and also began fostering a network with high school teachers of geography through his involvement with the National Council for Social Sciences and the National Council for Geographic Education, of which he was President in 1952. Today, the Clyde Kohn Colloquium Speaker Series, a weekly forum that serves to share ideas and host discussions between faculty guests and graduate students on the topic of geography, bears his name.

Neil E. Salisbury

Neil E. Salisbury, hired at Iowa in 1955, taught Weather Analysis, Physical Geography and Conservation of Natural Resources in the Geography department. In 1963, Salisbury and Gerard Rushton published Growth and Decline of Iowa Villages: A Pilot Study, which examined the nuances of rural population changes from a geographical point of view. Between 1955 and 1979, he published papers on valley width and stream discharge, flood plains, glacial landforms, and eolian landforms, largely based on fieldwork at various sites in Iowa.

Salisbury enjoyed participating in summer field camps in Michigan and several times at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in northwest Iowa, joined often by Geography departments from other Big Ten schools. Eventually, when the department began to offer summer field experiences, students had the opportunity to register for courses like Field Techniques, which were held at various locations in the west, in states like South Dakota, Colorado, and prominent locations like Yellowstone National Park.

Rex Honey

Rex D. Honey was a professor of Geography for the University of Iowa between January 1974 and 2006. Born in San Diego, Honey received his Bachelor's of Arts with honors from the University of California in Riverside in 1967 and later, in 1972, his PhD from the University of Minnesota. In 1974, he joined the University of Iowa faculty as an Assistant Professor and later became the Director of Global Studies. Between 2001 and 2003, Honey also served as the Co-Chair of the Ethics, Values and Human Rights Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. Between 2006 and 2010, Honey served as the Director of the Crossing Borders Program, Associate Director of the Center for Human Rights, and, for for a time, was the Director of African Studies. He was passionate about human rights, which much of his work and publicized works reflect. From the spatial organization of public goods and services in places like England, new Zealand, Jordan, and the United States to the developmental effects of hometown associations in Nigeria, Honey was invested in the overlap between human rights and geography. He invited teachers from Geography Alliance programs along with him to India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria when he wasn't traveling to give lectures to geography departments around the world. His legacy is one of political geography, human rights, and the advancement of spatial organization to benefit the greater good. After his passing in 2010, the annual Rex Honey Speaker Series was named in his honor.