Zelinsky, Wilbur (1921–)

Wilbur Zelinsky is an iconic cultural and population geographer who focuses on finding big-picture geographical manifestations of human meaning in every detail and facet of American life. He is an expert in field-based exploration, archival research, quantitative and qualitative analyses, cartographic representation, and clear and direct writing. His work reflects an unusual originality and continues to inform scholars in many disciplines.

Zelinsky was born in Chicago and began his academic career at Wright Junior College. He completed his baccalaureate at the University of California at Berkeley in 1944, earned a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1946, and returned to Berkeley for his PhD, which he completed in 1953. His early work experiences trained him for observation and analysis. He was a map draftsman in various firms during World War II, a terrain analyst for the Army Corps of Engineers in Occupied Germany in 1946, and an industrial location analyst for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway from 1954 to 1959. His academic appointments include the University of Georgia from 1948 to 1952, the University of Wisconsin as a researcher from 1952 to 1954, Wayne State University as an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1959, and Southern Illinois University from 1959 to 1963. He joined the geography department at Pennsylvania State University in 1963, where he has remained ever since. He was department head from 1970 to 1976, assumed emeritus status in 1987, and continues as an active scholar.

Zelinsky's publication record includes more than 200 books, atlases, chapters, articles, reviews, and reports, not counting reprints and second editions. Topics he has studied include cemeteries and cemetery names, energy consumption, food ways, log houses, migration, nationalism, personal names, place names, rural population distribution, settlement patterns, town forms, and vernacular regions. His first published article in 1948 was perhaps the first by any geographer on African Americans. His hypothesis of the mobility transition (an increase in rural to urban migration followed by an increase in intra- and interurban migration with modernization) is a significant complement to the concept of demographic transition (a decrease in death rates and, subsequently, birth rates occurring with modernization) both operationally and intellectually. He was the first geographer to write about the place of women in the profession. His 1974 presidential address to the Association of American Geographers (AAG), “The Demigod's Dilemma,” was an important early humanistic call to rethink overly scientistic premises in the social sciences. His scholarly focus in recent years has been the landscape effects of religion and the meaning of ethnicity.

Zelinsky was president of the AAG from 1972 to 1973, and honors include the AAG's 1966 [Page 3148]Award for Meritorious Contributions to Geography, a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1981 to 1982, and the 1993 Jackson Prize for the revised edition of his best-known work, a slim book titled The Cultural Geography of the United States. He received the American Geographical Society's Cullum Medal in 2001 and the AAG Presidential Achievement Award in 2006.