James M. “Jim” Blaut was a teacher, researcher, and political activist, whose work powerfully shaped geographers’ understandings of several topics, particularly colonialism and Eurocentrism as well as the spatial cognition of children.

Blaut was born in New York City and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago. He did postgraduate work at the Imperial School of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad and subsequently completed his PhD in geography and anthropology at Louisiana State University under the cultural geographer Fred Kniffen, with a dissertation on the microgeography of one acre in Singapore. Blaut went on to teach at Yale and Cornell and was director of the Caribbean Research Institute at the College of the Virgin Islands and a consultant to the government of Venezuela.

Blaut arrived at ...