Mark Rhodes

"Every artist, every scientist, must decide NOW where they stand. They have no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction-in certain countries-of the greatest of human literary heritages, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear. The artist must take sides. They must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
—Paul Robeson, 1958, Here I Stand

Contact

marhodes@mtu.edu
906-487-2459
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Associate Professor of Geography

PhD, Geography, Kent State University
MA, Geography, Kent State University

Research Interests

Post-Industrial Geographies & Heritage
National Identity in the 21st Century
Cultural Sustainability and Sustainable Tourism
Political Ecology, Place, & Memory
Critical Geographies & Memorial Landscapes

Areas of Expertise

Memory and Memorialization
Heritage Institutions
Cultural Landscape
Welsh Studies
Historical Geography
Cultural Geographies

Selected Publications

Rhodes, M, W. Price, and A. Walker. 2021. Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage. Routledge. ISBN: 9780367440909.
Rhodes, M., Hannum, K., and Ketola, Z. 2025. Managing the Imagined Spatialities of Protected Sites: (Un)Bounding Industrial World Heritage via Mental Maps. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2025.2464803
Tennent, H. and Rhodes, M. Accepted. “Demasiado Poco Homenaje”: The Eva Perón Tomato and Absence within Living Memorials. Lagoonscapes.
Rhodes, M. and Bartoszek, J. 2025. Memorial Entrepreneurship and the Political Economies of Food-Based Living Memory. Geographical Review 115 (1-2):138-154. DOI: 10.1080/00167428.2023.2283728.
Rhodes, M., Hannum, K., Burnau, M., Denison, V., Louya, K., Maue, G., McRoberts, M., Miller, R., Murphy, D., O'Connor, A., Rigby, N., Roth, E., Schapman, A., Swigart, W., Taylor, E., Trevino, C., Vaught, J., and Vaught, R. 2024. Museums, national resources, and the broader economic impacts of National Museum Wales. Welsh Economic Review 30: 1-9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18573/wer.273
Rhodes, M. 2024. National Museum Wales and the scalar bureaucracies of institutional memory work. Political Geography 111. DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103094.
Rhodes, M. and Hannum, K. 2024. Sustainability Pedagogy Aboard Amtrak: New Pathways of Transdisciplinary and Applied General Education. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 48 (5): 820-838. DOI: 10.1080/03098265.2024.2333287.
Rhodes, M. and Hannum, K. 2024. UNESCO, Mining Heritage, and the Scalar Sustainability of Tourism Geographies at industrial World Heritage Sites. Journal of Tourism Futures. DOI: 10.1108/JTF-10-2023-0235
Rhodes, M. and W. Price. 2024. ‘A Nation Built on Coal’: Transcalar landscapes of memory work at the Big Pit National Coal Museum. Tourism Geographies 26 (5): 755-77. 10.1080/14616688.2023.2253793.
Rhodes, M. and C. Keeve. 2023. More-Than-Human Memory: The Political Ecologies of the Paul Robeson Tomato. Journal of Political Ecology 30(1):424-47.
Rhodes, M. 2023. Transoptic Memorial Landscape Analysis: Multidimensional landscapes of a multinational Wales. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 24(2):1-21. DOI: 10.17169/fqs-24.2.3964.
Post, C. and M. Rhodes. 2022. Decolonizing Memory Work? Textual Politics of Settler State Historical Markers Engaging Indigenous Peoples in Kansas. ACME 21(5):540-59.
Price, W. and M. Rhodes. 2022. Coal Dust in the Wind: Interpreting the Industrial Past of South Wales. Tourism Geographies 24(4-5):837-58. DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2020.1801825.
Rhodes, M., C. Quayle*, and N. Indish*. 2022. “Post-Industrial Barbarians”: Star Trek, the Other, and the Apocalypse. Literary Geographies 8(1):78-98.
Rhodes, M. 2021. Cardiff and the Contentious Landscapes of Postindustrial, Urban, and Transnational Memory Work. Fennia: International Journal of Geography 199(2):203-25. DOI: 10.11143/fennia.113124.
Rhodes, M. 2021. The Absent Presence of Paul Robeson in Wales: Appropriation and Philosophical Disconnects in the Memorial Landscape. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 46(3):763-79. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12442.
Rhodes, M. 2021. The nation, the festival, and institutionalized memory: Transoptic landscapes of the Welsh National Eisteddfod. GeoHumanities 7(2):558-83 DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2021.1903812.
Rhodes, M. 2021. Dancing around the Subject: Memory Work of Museum Landscapes at the National Waterfront Museum. Professional Geographer 73(4):594-607. DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2021.1915808.
Rhodes, M. and C. Post. 2021. Refraining on Necropolitics: Lyrical Geographies of Labor Music. Journal of Cultural Geography 38(3):378-98. DOI: 10.1080/08873631.2021.1927322.
Rhodes, M. 2020. Exhibiting Memory: Temporary, mobile, and participatory memorialization and the Let Paul Robeson Sing! exhibition. Memory Studies 13(6):1235-55. DOI: 10.1177/1750698018794771.
Hannum, K. and M. Rhodes. 2018. Public art as public pedagogy: Memorial landscapes of the Cambodian genocide. Journal of Cultural Geography 35 (3): 334-361.

Rhodes, M. 2017. Alternate Pasts, Presents, and Futures in Star Trek: Historical engagement and representation through popular culture. The Geographical Bulletin 58 (1): 29-39.
Tyner, J., M. Rhodes, and S. Kimsroy. 2016. Music, Nature, Power, and Place: An Ecomusicology of Khmer Rouge Songs.GeoHumanities 2 (2): 395-412.
Rhodes, M. 2016. Placing Paul Robeson in History: Understanding His Philosophical Framework. Journal of Black Studies 47 (3): 235-257.

Selected Recent Funding

Rhodes, M. 2025. U.S. Department of State-Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program/Fulbright-Schuman European Union Affairs Program. Landscaping, Scaling, and Routing Policy in EU Industrial Heritage Institutionalization.
Rhodes, M. 2025. American Philosophical Society and the University of Edinburgh. Franklin Research Grant and Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Fellowship. Writing the Nation: Literary Geographies of National Museums Scotland Publications.
Rhodes, M. (co-PI), Scarlett, S.F. (co-PI), Trepal, D.J. (co-PI), MacLennan, C. (co-PI), and Lafreniere, D.J. (PI). 2024. US Dept of the Interior/National Park Service. Cultural Resources Management Services Grant. Equitable and Sustainable Futures in Industrial Cultural Resource Management. [Five-Year $0 Cooperative Agreement].
Rhodes, M. 2020. Michigan Technological University. Research Excellence Fund – Research Seed Grant. Community-Engaged Post-Industrial Geographies of World Heritage in Wales. Awarded.
MacLennan, C. and Rhodes, M. 2020. Keweenaw Heritage Grant for the Keweenaw County Historical Society and Historical School at Gay Museum. Copper Milling at Gay: A Lake Superior Story. Awarded.

Research Projects

National Identity and Heritage Institutions in Wales
World Heritage Sites and Industrial Heritage Policy
Legacies and Memorial Landscapes of Paul Robeson
Political Ecology and Living Memory
Cultural and Economic intersections with Futures Studies and Transformations

Dr. Rhodes is currently on research leave working as the 2025-2026 American Philosophical Society Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh and as the 2025-2026 Fulbright-Schuman European Union Affairs Scholar hosted by the Center for Interdisciplinary Area Studies and the Institute of Geosciences and Geography at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.