Morgan P. Vickers is an Assistant Professor of Race/Racialization in the Department of Law, Societies & Justice and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. Vickers researches swamplands, racialized ecologies, 20th-century infrastructure projects, and eco-social repair.
Vickers is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the social, racial, and legal construction and transformation of swamplands in the Lowcountry South. It will illuminate how of environmental and racial myths are legitimized through American policy measures and infrastructural development projects that were designed to facilitate the simultaneous erasure of undesirable people and unruly ecologies. Vickers has published articles related to these themes in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning F, and American Anthropologist.
Vickers is the Chair of the Landscape Specialty Group and an Executive Board member of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). They are a co-founder of the Wetlandia! Symposium at the University of Washington. They previously worked with The Black Geographic, Environmental History Now, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Community Histories Workshop, and A Red Record.
Vickers received their Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and their B.A. in American Studies, Communication Studies, and Non-Fiction Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Their work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Center for the Study of Demography and Ecology, the South Caroliniana Library, Wilson Library, the Processing Foundation, and the Black Studies Collaboratory.
✉ mvickers@uw.edu
articles
Jones, N., Bruno, T. M., Vickers, M. P., et. al. (2025). Crafting Black Ecologies: From the Gulf and Its Geographic Kin. Southern Cultures.
Vickers, M. P. (2025). Rendering Speculative Pasts: Visualizing Drowned Towns and Submerged Ecologies. American Anthropologist, 0(0), 1-5. DOI: aman.28085 DOI: 10.1111/aman.28085
Vickers, M. P. (2024). Fixing Crisis, Transforming Landscapes: Social, Spatial, Ecological, and Racial Fixes in New Deal South Carolina. Environment and Planning F: Philosophy, Models, Methods, and Practice. DOI: 10.1177/26349825241293794
Vickers, M. P. (2023). Dreaming through Submergence. The Arrow Journal.
Vickers, M. P. (2022) On Swampification: Black Ecologies, Moral Geographies, and Racialized Swampland Destruction. The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 113(7), 1674-1681. DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2137455
book reviews
Vickers, M.P. (2025). [Review of In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings by James C. Scott]. AAG Review of Books, 13(4). DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2025.2539497
talks and events
2025-2026
Environmental Justice and Humanities Lab. University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC). April.
Floodplains by Design (FbD). Washington State Department of Ecology (Seattle, WA). January.
Center for the Study of Demography and Ecology. University of Washington (Seattle, WA). October.
Decolonizing Energy. Georgetown University in Qatar (Doha, Qatar). October.
2024-2025
The University of Washington. Department of Geography (Seattle, WA). April.
International Association for Landscape Ecology — North American Regional Chapter (Raleigh, NC). April.
The American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting (Detroit, MI). March.
Emory University. Race & Electric Utilities in the United States. Powering Reliable Connections: From Historical Insights to Collaborative Research in Electric Power Systems (Atlanta, GA). March.
Contesting Black Citizenship. Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (Middelburg, Netherlands). December.
2023-2024
Drala Mountain Center. The Arrow Journal (Virtual). October.
Common Pool Resources in the Visual Turn Summer School. 12th European Society for Environmental History Conference (Grimentz, Switzerland). August.
Roundtable on Disturbing Development by Mona Domosh. London Group of Historical Geographers – Institute of Historical Research (Virtual). June.
2022-2023
Caribbean Studies Association Annual Conference (Virtual). June.
Yale University. (Re)thinking Landscape: Ways of Knowing / Ways of Being Conference (New Haven, CT). October.
University of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor, MI). October.
2021-2022
The University of Pennsylvania EnviroLab. Placing: New Engagements with the ‘Environment’ (Virtual). March.
The American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting (Virtual). March.
The Smithsonian Institution. National Air and Space Museum. Claiming Space Afrofuturism Symposium (Virtual). January.
Dismantle Preservation Virtual Unconference (Virtual). July.
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