Tony Stallins

Department Chair and Professor

My research crosses the boundaries that separate physical and human geography. I draw on fieldwork, GIS, and philosophical approaches to organism–environment relations to explore how landscapes, cities, and organisms are produced, as well as how boundaries among them are conceptualized. My early work examined how coastal dune plants modify topography and influence the resilience of barrier island beaches to storm surge. I later developed NSF-funded GIS research on how land cover and atmospheric properties shape thunderstorm severity and lightning production around cities. My recent scholarship investigates the infrastructures that form around the interaction of humans with non-human organisms, including the exotic reptile trade, wildlife rehabilitation networks, eBird observations, and antimicrobial resistance. My scholarship has been cited in fields as wide-ranging as biogeomorphology, urban climatology, animal geographies, complexity theory, and geographic thought, reflecting a sustained influence in debates over how physical, biological and social processes become entangled in geographic explanation.

Contact Information

ja.stallins@uky.edu

815 Patterson Office Tower

(859) 257-2138

Education

PhD Geography, University of Georgia (2000)
MS Biology, Georgia State University (1995)
BS Geology, Florida State University (1985)

Research Interests

Geographies of earth, life, organisms, interactions, boundaries

Affiliations

Geography

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Research

Physical geography
Animal and plant geographies
Organism-environmental interactions
Geographic thought and philosophy
Complexity and resilience theory

I encourage students to question their disciplinary boundaries and to be aware of how academics is constructed and maintained by certain practices, expectations, and social norms.

Graduate Students

URRENT
Bethany Clark (PhD, Geography, Co-directing). Process and relationality in body-health cartographies

Gregory Serrano (PhD, Gender and Women's Studies, Committee member). Animal sanctuaries and the differing encounters of care.

COMPLETED DEGREES
Aleks Craine (PhD 2026). Spatial marginalization of emotional support animals (Visiting Assistant Professor, Centre College)

Karen Kinslow (PhD, 2023). Re-Storying Cane Run Creek: Encountering representations, affects, and vegetal geographies. (Assistant Professor, Longwood University)

RL Martens (MA, 2023) Suburban invasion, landscaping aesthetics, and the rise and fall of the Bradford pear (US Forest Service)

Colby Clark (PhD, Philosophy 2023, co-advised with Ted Schatzki) The primacy of openness in ecological systems theory (Visiting Assistant Professor, Witchita State Univ)

Chelsea Parise (MA,Spring 2022). Redlining and just green enough in the urban forest of Boston's Franklin Park

Li-Chih Hsu (PhD, Spring 2019). Visualizing barrier island dune topographic state space. (Assistant Professor, National Kaohsiung Normal University, Taiwan)

Jackie Monge (MA, Spring 2014) Convergence of dune topography among multiple barrier island morphologies. (NV5 Geospatial)

Sophie Strosberg (MA, Spring 2014). The human-hookworm assemblage: contingency and the practice of helminthic therapy.

Megan White (MA, 2014). Associating severe thunderstorm warnings with demographic and landscape variables: a geographically weighted regression based mapping of forecast bias.

Courses

GEO 261 Global Dynamics of Health

ENS 399 Internship in Environment and Sustainability

ENS 300 Environment on Film

ENS 202: Natural Science and Policy

GEO 130 Earth's Physical Environments

GEO 135 Global Climate Change

GEO 162 Global Environmental Issues

BIOL 280/ENV 280 Introduction to Environmental Science
Study Abroad - Costa Rica

GEO 351 Physical Landscapes

GEOG 585 Society, Climate and Resources
Study Abroad - Netherlands

GEOG 364 Geography of Europe
Study Abroad - Netherlands

GEO 406 Field Studies in Geography

BIOL 475/GEOG 455 Global Environmental Change
Study Abroad - Costa Rica

GEO 530 Biogeography and Conservation

GEO 702 Concepts in Geography

GEO 721 Ecological Theory in Geography

GEO 721 Digital Field Mapping

GEO 741 Teaching Practicum

Course content available upon request.

Selected Publications

Selected Publications:

RESEARCHGATE | GOOGLE SCHOLAR

(Since 2012, student co-authors in bold)

Tadaki, M., Dufour, S., Adamson, G., Stallins, J. A., Lane, S. N., and Lave, R. (2026). Book review forum: The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research (2025) R. Lave and S. N. Lane (Eds). Productively kicking the ontological can (JAS). Environment and Planning F. (Forthcoming)

Barceinas Cruz, A., Philo, C., Rupprecht, C.D.D., Stallins, J.A., and Barua, M. 2026 Book review forum: Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology (2023) by Maan Barua. Liveliness in the gerrymandered city (JAS). Environment and Planning F: https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825261423657

Stallins, J. A., Lally, N., and Luther, E. (2023). Infrastructure and the ethnographic-cartographic production of urban bird species richness. Environment and Planning F 2(4): 515-540. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825231200605

Stallins, J. A. (2021). The Anthropocene: The one, the many, and the topological. Annals of the American Association of Geographers., 111(3): 638-646.

Stallins, J.A., Hsu, L.C. , Zinnert, J. C., and Brown, J. 2020. How bottom-up and top-down controls shape dune topographic variability along the U.S. Virginia barrier island doast and the inference of dune dynamical properties. Journal of Coastal Conservation 24: 30.

Hsu, L.C. and Stallins, J.A. 2020. Multiple representations of topographic pattern and geographic context determine barrier dune resistance, resilience, and the overlap of coastal biogeomorphic models. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110 (3): 640-660.

Stallins, J.A. and Strosberg, S. (2019). Ontology, difference, and anticipating the antimicrobial resistance timeline. Futures 115.

Stallins, J.A. and Corenblit, D. 2018 Interdependence of geomorphic and ecological resilience properties in a geographic context. Geomorphology 305: 76-93

White, M and Stallins, J.A. 2017. Non-meteorological influences on severe thunderstorm warning issuance. Weather, Climate, and Society 9(3), 421-439

Stallins, J.A., Law, D., Strosberg, S., Rossi, J. 2016. Geography and postgenomics: How space and place are the new DNA GeoJournal 83(1): 153-168

Zinnert, J. Stallins, J.A., Brantley, S.T., and Young, D.R. 2016. Crossing Scales: Complexity of barrier island processes for predicting future change. BioScience 67(1), p.39-52

Monge, J. and Stallins, J.A. 2016. Properties of dune topographic state space for six barrier Islands of the U.S. southeastern Atlantic coast. Physical Geography 37(6): 452-475.

Watson, K. and Stallins, J.A. 2016. Honey bees and Colony Collapse Disorder: a pluralistic reframing. Geography Compass 10(5) 222–236

Stallins, J.A. 2015. The eco-social and the evolutionary. Progress in Physical Geography 39(5): 669-674.

Stallins, J.A., Mast, J., and Parker, A. 2015. Resilience theory and Thomas Vale's Plants and People: A partial consilience of ecological and geographic concepts of succession. Professional Geographer 67(1): 28–40.

Smith, M., Stallins, J.A., Maxwell, J., and Van Dyke, C. 2013. The complex nature of hydrological shifts and tree growth responses to river modification along the Apalachicola River, Florida. Physical Geography 34(6): 491-511

Stallins, J.A. and Kelley, L. 2013. The embeddedness of a native North American snake in the wildlife pet trade and the production of assemblage geographies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103 (3) 417-436.

Stallins, J.A., J. Carpenter, M. Bentley, W. Ashley, and J. Mulholland, 2012: Weekend-weekday aerosols and geographic variability in cloud-to-ground lightning for the urban region of Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Regional Environmental Change 13(1): 137–151.

Stallins, J.A. 2012. Scale, causality, and the new organism-environment interaction. Geoforum 43 427–441.