Dr Wallace has dedicated over forty years of continuous service to Canadian geography. Based in Carleton’s Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, he has served with distinction as a researcher, colleague, teacher and role model. His Carleton career reaches back to the early 1970s when geography was transitioning from a series of elective service courses into a recognized undergraduate program. Dr Wallace was central to the development and delivery of the standard geography courses of the day, including those with a focus on the economy and on transportation. Over the years, those standard courses have been re-invented several times and his current second year course, Global Connections: Economy, Culture and Environment, is the training ground for more than two hundred undergraduates each year. In addition he has taken on several key administrative posts both in the department and more broadly at the university, ranging from Departmental Chair and Chair of Graduate Studies, to the Graduate Faculty Board’s Chair of the Graduate Programs and Planning Committee. These contributions will continue to shape Geography and many other programs at Carleton for many years to come.
His shaping of the highly innovative doctoral program in Geography during the mid-1990s is perhaps his most important and lasting contribution to Carleton and to the discipline of Geography in Canada more widely. Its framing as a program that promotes the spanning of “human geography” and ”physical geography” in ways that acknowledged the particular skill sets and interests of both orientations while identifying ways to bridge gaps was intellectually innovative and also an important team building exercise for the Department. He remains committed to the PhD program, and has continued to contribute to and deliver the PhD core seminars.
Dr Wallace’s service to and influence over geography reaches across Canada. As part of his scholarly contributions, he published a key text on the global economy just as economic globalization was beginning to garner widespread attention (The Global Economic System, Unwin Hyman, London, 1990) as well as the definitive textbook on Canada’s economic geography (A Geography of the Canadian Economy, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 2002). These volumes have done much to extend geographical education both at Carleton and elsewhere.
Over the last forty years, Dr Wallace also has served with distinction in many capacities within the Canadian Association of Geographers, including President of the Association in 1998-2000, and CAG local events coordinator when the national conference was held at Carleton in 2009. He has been a valuable member of the Ontario Council of Graduate Studies, and has served on the awards committee and the board of directors at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
Dr Wallace has continuously championed the development and promotion of geography as a discipline that thrives on looking forward and, when necessary, re-inventing itself to take on new challenges. His current work on Space, Place and the Gospel continues to break new ground and, given his ability to grapple with emerging areas of geography, it is not surprising that Dr Wallace has embraced a new geographic field at this stage of career. Innovation and searching for new geographic ground continues to be the norm!
Dr Wallace has taught all of us that one’s ego should never interfere with scholarship and collegial academic life. He has the uncanny ability to ask hard questions of colleagues in a way that encourages the advancement of geography (and the academy more broadly), and so that all of those involved in a particular issue feel listened to and willing to move on.
His forty plus years of service to Canadian geography have promoted the growth of our discipline as well its evolution as a mature and incisive field of scholarship, while preparing several generations of new geographers to further contribute to this trajectory. Truly this is an exemplary record of service to the discipline and the Canadian Association of Geographers.
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