Founded in 1968, with two faculty members (Chair, Hon. Peter Adams and Dr Fred Helleiner), the Department of Geography offers comprehensive BA and BSc degree programs attractive to single and joint geography majors. Featuring compulsory methods courses, local and international fieldwork experiences, and community-based education opportunities across a range of sub-disciplinary specializations, the programs provide foundational training and critical perspectives in human and physical geography.
Over the years, faculty research interests have emerged in several fields of study including within human geography - cultural and historical, political, recreation and tourism, social and health, and urban and economic, and within physical geography - climatology, geomatics and remote sensing, geomorphology, hydrology, and pedology. The research-intensive nature of the Geography Department provides many value-added opportunities for undergraduate students to get involved while offering outstanding training for graduate students.
Fundamental to the department's curriculum is the ongoing commitment to fieldwork as essential to what makes geography and geographers unique. As part of field-based and community-based research courses, for instance, geography students and faculty have worked in a variety of urban, rural and remote environments across Ontario, North America and internationally, with a longstanding emphasis on the Canadian North.
Geography faculty and students are also actively involved in Trent's graduate programs in Applications of Modeling, Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies, Environmental and Life Sciences, Sustainability Studies and the Interdisciplinary Social Research PhD.