William Denevan

Who is William Denevan?

William Maxfield Denevan is professor emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a prominent member of the Berkeley School of Latin Americanist Geography. He also worked in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the same university. His interests are in historical ecology and indigenous demography of the Western Hemisphere.

He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. Motivated by the German guest professor Herbert Wilhelmy, his dissertation was on "The Aboriginal Settlement of the Llanos de Mojos: A Seasonally Inundated Savanna in Northeastern Bolivia," which he edited into a book in 1966. In 1963 he became Assistant Professor at Wisconsin, where he remained throughout his career, serving as chair of the department from 1980–1983, and becoming the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography in 1987. In 1977, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2001, he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.