Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities Series - Sense of Place in the Contemporary Crime Thriller

James Roberto Curtis is an associate professor of geography at California State University, Long Beach. He is the coauthor of The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality and The Cuban American Experience: Culture, Images, and Perspectives. He is also the author of the award-winning novel Shang�. Curtis bridges the gap between academic scholarship and creative writing as they relate to issues of identity and environment. He is interested in the character of urban places, especially Third World cities. Curtis's talk will draw on his scholarly pursuits in the areas of geography, creative writing, and Latino studies but will focus on the sense of place in popular literature: crime thrillers.