Chris Duvall

Professor & Department Chair, Geography and Environmental Sciences
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison

duvall@unm.edu | CV |

Dr. Chris Duvall received an appointment with the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at The University of New Mexico in 2008. As a biogeographer, Duvall’s research relates to how humans represent and depict their environment, as well as human-plant interaction. His academic interests include cultural and historical ecology, African diaspora, food geography, and science studies. Duvall is interested in how the social constructions of human difference affect access to and use of environmental resources, human-environment interactions involved in illicit drug commerce, and the environmental meanings of food, among other topics. His research has focused on cannabis and other plants that enslaved people in western Central Africa used medicinally, including his books Cannabis (Reaktion Books, 2015) and The African Roots of Marijuana (Duke University Press, 2019).

Interests:

Biogeography, cultural and political ecology, African studies, historical geography, science studies, food and drugs studies

Research:

Dr. Duvall examines people-plant interactions from perspectives ranging from biogeography to cultural studies to historical geography, mostly in Africa but also in the U.S.