Anne Kelly Knowles
Contact
As an historical geographer, I am endlessly interested in the relationship between historical events, ways of life, how places evolve, geographical circumstances, and spatial connections. I have studied what moved Welsh people to emigrate to the United States, why American entrepreneurs struggled to match the productivity of the British iron industry, and a few of the many geographies of the Holocaust. For me, every study begins with questions of why certain things happened in some places and not others; how local conditions influenced people’s decisions; and how human actions shaped the built and natural landscape. I also have an abiding interest in finding methodological solutions to intellectual problems and in fostering productive, creative collaboration among scholars and students. Building bridges across disciplines has been a hallmark of my career.
After studying English and American literature as an undergraduate, I worked for years as a book editor in New York and Chicago. In the mid-1980s I happened to discover historical geography while editing a new U.S. history textbook with an ambitious map program. It changed my life. I received my PhD in Geography from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993 and took up my first teaching position that year in the Institute of Earth Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. There I taught primarily in Welsh, a beautiful language that I had learned to research 19th-century Welsh immigration for my dissertation. A postdoctoral fellowship at Wellesley College lured me back to the USA. A few years in the American wilderness followed, during which I began to focus on the potential of using GIS (geographic information systems) in historical research and teaching. In 2002 when I was hired into a tenure-track position in the Geography Department at Middlebury College, where I taught for thirteen years. I joined the Department of History at the University of Maine in August 2015.
Research grants and fellowships
2026-27 Ina Levine Invitational Scholar, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
2025 University of Maine System Trustee Professorship.
2022-24 PI, National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, Award HAA-287827-22, for Placing the Holocaust: A Digital Platform for Exploring the Intersecting Places of Victims and Perpetrators ($150,000).
2021 Regular Faculty Research Award, University of Maine, for archival and field research toward An Atlas of the Holocaust ($10,000).
2021 Collaborative Research Seed Grant, Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis (Anika Walke, Project Coordinator; Anne Kelly Knowles and Dan Miller, Collaborators), for “Capturing Place-Based Experiences in Holocaust Survivor Testimony” ($14,195).
2020 Faculty Research Award, McGillicuddy Humanities Center, University of Maine, to support Dan Miller’s continued development of digital tools to enable tagging and analysis of the spatial content in Holocaust survivor interview transcripts ($2,000).
2019 Faculty Research Award, McGillicuddy Humanities Center, University of Maine, to work with Levi Westerveld on a topological approach to mapping place and movement during the Holocaust ($2,000).
2018-2022 PI, co-PIs Paul B. Jaskot and Anika Walke, National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, Award HAA-261290, for The Holocaust Ghettos Project: Reintegrating Victims and Perpetrators through Places and Events ($296,455).
2016-2018 PI, National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, Level II, Award HE-248377-16, for Visualizing Spatial Experience in Holocaust Testimony ($73,168).
2015 Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (taken 2017).
2014 Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History, co-directed with Paul B. Jaskot.
2012 Newberry Library Short Term Fellowship in the History of Cartography.
2011 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend.
2008 – 2011 National Science Foundation Collaborative Research Grant No. 0820487, Holocaust Historical GIS (Alberto Giordano, PI) and Research at an Undergraduate Institution Grant No. 0820501 (Anne Kelly Knowles, PI).
2005 National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship.
2003 National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant to the Newberry Library, History and Geography: Assessing the Role of Geographical Information in Historical Scholarship.
1999 American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship.
1997 – 1999 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Geography, Wellesley College.
1997, 1998 British Academy personal research grants.
Honors and awards
2019 Avenza Competition for Cartographic Design, 1st prize, American Association of Geographers, for I Was There: Places of Experience in the Holocaust, by Levi Westerveld and Anne Kelly Knowles.
2014 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Award, Association of American Geographers.
2014 Distinguished Historical Geographer, Historical Geography Specialty Group, Association of American Geographers.
2012 American Ingenuity Award for Historical Scholarship, Smithsonian magazine.
