Richard Schein is Professor and Chair of Geography at the University of Kentucky (USA). He is a former Fulbright Bicentennial Chair of North American Studies at the University of Helsinki (2012-2013) and has been named Distinguished Historical Geographer (2011) by the Association of American Geographers. He holds a PhD (Maxwell School, Syracuse University) and MS (Penn State) in Geography and an AB (Franklin and Marshall College) in Government. His published work explores US settlement practices (questions of land and property), methodology in historical geography (archival practices; landscape as a social wrong), and the American landscape – its origins, its form, its meaning, its contestation. Most recently that work is focused upon the place of landscape, as an epistemological framework and as a material thing or set of things, in American social and racial formation.