Music and Geography and Retirement

Brief Biography

David Knight was born in Scotland in 1941 but the family moved to New Zealand immediately after WWII. He received an excellent education at John McGlashan College in Dunedin before, in 1958, the family returned to Scotland where he completed his high schooling in St. Andrews while studying timpani at the University of St. Andrews. In 1960 he moved to the USA to study at Macalester College. While there he was the drumming instructor and, just after graduating in 1964 with a B.A. in History and Geography, he taught in an African Women's Summer Institute at the college. He then moved to Chicago to work for a year on the editorial staff of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He thereafter completed graduate work in Michigan before studying for his PhD at the University of Chicago. A job at Carleton University in Ottawa beckoned so he and his wife moved to Canada in 1970. While beginning his teaching career at Carleton he undertook research in the National Archives of Canada for his dissertation (on the selection of Ottawa as the capital city). While at Carleton he held administrative positions in the Department of Geography, the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, and the Carleton University Press. He has been a visiting professor at several institutions and in 1988–1989 he was honoured to be a Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi University, Cambridge University, where he worked on geography and international law. In 1992 he was appointed Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Guelph. Over the years he has held a number of non-university administrative positions, not least Chair of the AAG Political Geography Specialty Group and Chair of the IGU Commission on the World Political Map. He retired in 2006.