In 1823, seven years before the publication of the first edition of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, the University appointed its first Professor of Chemistry and Geology, James Wayne Delton Jackson, who had been a member of UGA's first graduating class in 1804. By 1830, a substantial sum had been appropriated to begin a mineral collection for the University. In the 1850s to 1870s, Geology was taught by a number of faculty members who most noticeably included Joseph LeConte and William Louis Jones, otherwise known as "Old Ichthy" to his students. The early professors were not a diverse group: Three of five came from one county in Georgia, and two of those were cousins who had studied at the same institutions; two others went to the same medical school, and all came from wealthy and/or powerful families.
For details about individuals, see the chronological list of UGA Geology faculty members
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Geology's affiliation with Chemistry at UGA continued until about 1872. In 1888 it was affiliated with Biology, and then it returned to its affiliation with Chemistry. Among persons teaching in this era were George Little and J.W. Spencer. These professors represented a transition toward faculty members who were truly geologists rather than chemists or general natural scientists, who had Ph.D. degrees, and who taught only geology. Sadly, this was also a trend, at least for the next few decades, toward faculty members who only stayed at the University a year or two.
For details about individuals, see the chronological list of UGA Geology faculty members
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Geology reappeared later in the 1930s in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. It was taught by Dr. Geoffrey W. Crickmay, a Yale Geology Ph.D. Crickmay and E. Scott Sell, author of Geography of Georgia, who were housed in Meigs Hall in the late 1930s. Crickmay left the University of Georgia to serve in the armed forces during World War II. When he returned, he found that the geological collections had largely disappeared, and he left the University. Among the students present during Dr. Crickmay's last years here was the young Vernon J. Hurst, of whom more will be told below.
A Department of Geography (and geology) was begun in 1946 under the headship of Dr. Merle C. Prunty, Jr. Prunty was a geographer, and the department of the late 1940s consisted of five geographers and one geologist. That geologist was Eldon Parizek, whose Ph.D. was in petroleum geology and thus who had to retrain himself for the geology of the Piedmont and Blue Ridge. By the 1950s the faculty of that department included a few more geologists, some of whom would be part of the Department of Geology in 1961.
The Department's early years
If you can provide corrections, please send an email message to Bruce Railsback
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Faculty members in the new Department of Geology were not a randomly selected group with regard to their graduate education, a trend that can be traced back into the previous Department of Geography. Charlie Salotti, Ken Hamblin, and Armando Giardini all received their Ph.D.s from University of Michigan between 1955 and 1960, and John Hoyt had a 1952 M.S. from Michigan, the institution from which Jim Woodruff (who stayed in Geography) had earned his Ph.D. in 1952. In a similar vein, Norm Herz, Vernon Hurst, Gilles Allard, John Schlee, and Bob Power all earned their Ph.D.s from John Hopkins between 1950 and 1960. Thus Johns Hopkins Ph.D.s. (Hurst, Allard, and Herz) were the first three heads of the Department of Geology, spanning the years from 1961 to 1977.
The Geology Department went through stormy years in the late 1960s, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s disputes within the Department reached the point that many younger faculty members left permanently (e.g., Elwood, Ciesielski, Ledbetter, Stormer and Pemberton) or took leave to work elsewhere temporarily (e.g., Whitney and Wenner). By the 1970s, the Department was housed in parts of four buildings (Geology-Geography-Speech, Riverbend Research Labs, Barrow Hall, and the Hydrothermal Lab), as it is today.
The first three, and five of the first eight, M.S. theses that were defended were supervised by Dr. Vernon J. Hurst, as was the first dissertation to be defended. Most early theses dealt with geologic areas or problems in Georgia, but by the 1970s and 1980s thesis topics included geologic work around the world as well as in Georgia. Theses and dissertations in the Department have dealt with geologic problems in or on Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Cayman Trough, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico, Costa Rica, Venezuela and the Venezuelan Basin, Brazil, Argentina, the South Atlantic, Morocco, Ethiopia, Namibia, South Africa, Madagascar, the Indian Ocean, the Australian Basin, the East Pacific Rise, the Eastern Equatorial Pacific, Thailand, Russia, Greece, Italy, England, Norway, Iceland, Quebec, the United States, and Mars.
The number of M.S. theses defended peaked in the early 1980s, with a high of twenty-three in 1982 (just after the price of crude oil reached its pre-1990 high). Defenses of M.S. theses declined in the early 1990s and reached a post-1974 low in 1993, when only five were defended. However, by 1996 that number had rebounded to fifteen, well over the average for years since 1974. By July 2013, at least 474 master theses and doctoral dissertations had been successfully defended in the Department. Those students were variously advised by virtually every faculty member in the Department, but some faculty members have stood out with regard to number of students advised. Faculty members with fifteen or more advisees who completed degrees include the following:
These departures led to the hiring of several new faculty members in the early and middle 1990s. If the Department's faculty members in the 1960s and 1970s were concentrated in economic geology, igneous petrology, marine geology, and paleontology, hiring in the 1990s made hydrogeology one of the Department's areas of focus, along with continuing concentrations of faculty in igneous petrology and paleontology. Almost all of the faculty members hired in the 1990s were recent Ph.D.s, leading to a relatively young and active faculty.
If you can provide corrections, please send an email message to Bruce Railsback
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A major change in the undergraduate curriculum in the 1990s was the elimination of the traditional sequence of courses required of Geology majors under the quarter system. That sequence had consisted of Mineralogy, Petrology, Structural Geology, Paleontology, and Sedimentation & Stratigraphy. Instead, beginning with the transition to the semester system in Fall 1998 under Head Samuel E. Swanson, the Department instituted a more modern curriculum requiring four "core" courses for Geology majors. Those four courses were Earth Materials; Surficial and Near-Surficial Processes; Life, Environments, and Ecologies of the Past; and Internal Earth Processes. In about 2003 two more courses, Sedimentary Geology and Structural Geology, entered the core curriculum, giving it a content nearer that of the old curriculum.
The six pre-1998 quarter-system courses required of geology majors | The six post-2002 semester-system courses required of geology majors | |
Mineralogy and Crystallography (GLY 321) | Earth Materials (GEOL 3010) | |
Optical Mineralogy and Petrology I (GLY 322) | Earth Materials (GEOL 3010) & Internal Earth Processes (GEOL 4020) | |
Petrology II (GLY 323)1 | Internal Earth Processes (GEOL 4020)2 | |
Surficial and Near-Surficial Processes (GEOL 3020) | ||
Structural Geology (GLY 332) | Structural Geology (GEOL 4060)2 | |
Invertebrate Paleontology (GLY 403) | Life, Environments, and Ecologies of the Past (GEOL 4010)3 | |
Sedimentation and Stratigraphy (GLY 405) | Sedimentary Geology (GEOL 4500)3 | |
_____ 1GLY 323 included sedimentary petrology, which was not included in GEOL 4020. |
____ 2Structural geology and plate tectonics were were originally topics in GEOL 4020. 3GEOL 4010 originally included sedimentology and stratigraphy, which later became the topics of GEOL 4500. |
The 1990s also saw a corresponding change toward an environmental focus in the Department's offerings for non-majors. At the beginning of 1994, GLY 115 changed from "Earth Processes and Resources" to "Earth Processes and Environments". In the change from the quarter system to the semester system in 1998, GLY 116 or "The Earth Through Time" changed to "Earth's History of Global Change" (GEOL 1122). Other environmental courses, including "Introduction to Environmental Geology", "Geologic Hazards", and "Applied Environmental Geology", also joined the undergraduate curriculum at the 200, 300, and 400 levels, respectively. In the early 2000s, a new basic course titled "Environmental Geoscience" (GEOL 1120) was added to the curriculum.
Pre-1994 quarter-system courses largely for non-majors | Post-2004 semester-system courses largely for non-majors | |
Environmental Geoscience (GEOL 1120) | ||
Earth Processes and Resources (GLY 115) | ||
Earth Processes and Environments (GEOL 1121) | ||
The Earth Through Time (GLY 116) | ||
Earth's History of Global Change (GEOL 1122) |
In the early 2000s, the Department began a series of renovation projects to update classrooms that had undergone little change since the Geography-Geology building was built in the late 1950s. One milestone was the renovation of Room 200A, the Department's large lecture hall, and another was the renovation of Room 327, the room for classes needing microscopes.
The Department also made history in 2000 when it appointed Dr. Susan T. Goldstein as its Head and thus as the first woman to be head of a department in the Physical Sciences at the University of Georgia. Dr. Goldstein was also the first head who was not a member of the "hard-rock" faculty of the Department. She also introduced the innovation of an associate headship, a position to share the growing administrative burden in the era of constant accountability and assessment. The first associate head, Dr. Michael F. Roden, went on to be head from 2006 to 2012, when he handed over the reins to Dr. Douglas E. Crowe.
In a striking recognition of scholarship, Sally Walker became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science late in 2012. She joined Norman Herz (and perhaps others) among the Department's faculty members who had achieved that honor. Her honor followed on the earlier award of the Paleontological Society's Schuchert Medal to Steve Holand.
Another departmental accomplishment in the same time period, but of a different sort, was a trifecta of presidencies of scholarly societies. In 2011, Paul Schroeder was president of the Clay Minerals Society, in 2013 Sue Goldstein re-assumed the presidency of the Cushman Foundation (the scholarly society of micropaleontology), and in 2014 Steve Holland became president of the Paleontological Society. During the same period, Sandra Wyld was editor of the Geological Society of America's journal Geology, a post she assumed not long after Sue Goldstein's editorship of the Journal of Foraminiferal Research.
In 2011, the Department was revitalized when, after fifteen years without an outside search for a new faculty member, it hired Adam Milewski as an assistant (now associate) professor in groundwater resources. That hire was followed in 2014 by the recruitment of Christian Klimczak as an assistant professor in structural geology and in 2017 with the recruitment of Geoff Howarth as an assistant professor in mineralogy. These hires were an encouraging sign of support from the University as the Department celebrated its fiftieth anniversary and as it approaches the two-hundredth anniversary of the teaching of geology at the University of Georgia.
Other historical webpages constructed to accompany this one include
A chronological list of UGA Geology faculty members.
A chronological list of UGA Geology department heads and staff members.
A table of the number of UGA Geology M.S. theses and Ph.D. Disserations defended by year.
and also of interest may be
A list of UGA Geology dissertations and theses.
A list of awards won by UGA Geology students and faculty.
Sources:
If you can suggest additions or corrections to the material above, please
email Bruce Railsback at rlsbk@gly.uga.edu.
To Railsback's main page
As noted above, recent research into the early history of Geology at UGA began with the efforts of Dr. Vernon J. Hurst.  The great trove of early history is
Thomas Walter Reed 's History of the University of Georgia, (~1949).  Additional information about William Louis Jones is in part from Tracy Coley Ingram, "Academic Building is two-in-one": Athens Daily News and Banner-Herald June 28, 2000, Hometown page 1. In that article, Ingram cited an article by T.W. Reed in the 1937 Alumni Record and A Pictorial History of Athens by James Reap. Geology's history in Meigs Hall is from a UGA history of Meigs Hall . Some of the information about the Department of Geology and Geography in the 1940s is from articles by Fraser Hart and others in James O. Wheeler and Stanley D. Brunn (eds.) The Role of the South in the Making of American Geography: Centennial of the AAG, 2004
To the UGA Geology Home Page