In Memoriam: Philip L. Wagner (Oct. 7, 1921–March 5, 2014)

Philip Wagner, a trail-blazing cultural geographer of Sauer’s “Berkeley School of Cultural Geography,” died on March 5, 2014, at age 92, in North Vancouver, British Columbia, after a period of illness.

A Californian by birth, Phil was raised in Los Gatos, near San Francisco. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where he took three degrees—his B.A. in 1947, with a double major in Russian language and Russian history; his M.A. in 1950, with a thesis on “Russian Exploration in North America”; and his Ph.D. in 1953, on Nicoya: Historical Geography of a Central American Lowland Community, under the supervision of Carl Sauer.

Between 1953 and 1954, while serving as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Phil taught courses to military personnel in the Far Eastern Program of the University of California Extension. It was here that he met Robert K. Hall, the famous linguist, who taught him Japanese and how to write Kanji characters. After Phil was discharged from the military, he came to the University of Chicago on a research associate appointment in the Slavic Languages and Literatures Program. In 1955, when Chauncey Harris became the Dean of Social Sciences, he elevated Phil to a regular appointment as Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography. While a faculty member in the Department of Geography, he was involved with the Anthropology Department’s Chiapas Project in Mexico. It was in connection with the Chiapas Project that he interested the late David Hill in doing his doctorate dissertation on the changing landscape of Villa Las Rosas, a Mexican municipal in the Chiapas. Although Phil was heavily involved in the Chiapas Project, he was simultaneously busy writing his book, Human Use of the Earth (1960). Working with Marvin Mikesell, they jointly introduced cultural geography as a new course in the Department of Geography. The shared venture led to the publication of Readings in Cultural Geography (1962).

In 1961, Phil left Chicago for the University of California, Davis, where he was an Associate Professor in both the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Geography. Later, he served as the Associate Dean in the College of Letters and Sciences at Davis, from 1963 to 1967. In the fall of 1967, Phil came to Simon Fraser University as a Professor of Geography at the new fledgling Canadian university. His coming to SFU immediately raised the visibility of the university and added stature to the geography department, and Phil was asked to set up the university’s Geography Graduate Studies program. While teaching in the geography department, Phil was instrumental in helping the university establish the Latin American Studies (LAS) program, where he participated actively in the LAS Field School and its activities. The latter involved teaching and participating in field studies undertaken by LAS students in Guatemala and Cuba. In addition to these new programs at SFU, Phil found time to promote interdisciplinary seminar participation among faculty members and graduate students. He, together with Dr. Wyn Roberts, a professor of linguistics, formed a study group called the Pi-Digamma Seminar, which met weekly on Thursday afternoons in a common room where interested colleagues, grad students, and friends would meet for at least two hours to discuss any topic of interdisciplinary interest to the university community. Many colleagues and students who participated in some of the seminars thought the interdisciplinary exchanges were some of the best dialogues they ever had during the early years at SFU.

When Phil came to SFU, he brought with him the Prentice-Hall Foundations of Cultural Geography Series. Under his editorship, six volumes were published, including his Environments and Peoples (1972), Zelinsky’s Cultural Geography of the United States (1973), and J. F. Hart’s Rural Landscapes of the Western World (1975).

Between 1977 and 1981, Phil was a member of the Simon Fraser University Senate and also a Senator on the Senate Appeals Board. Phil was a member of both the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers (APCG), the...