Joseph J. Hobbs, a professor of geography at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is a Middle East specialist with many years of field research on Bedouin peoples and biogeographies of the deserts of Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. Growing up in Saudi Arabia and India sparked his interest in the region, and he served as the team leader of the Bedouin Support Program, which identified opportunities and benefits for local people in the St. Katherine National Park project in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Dr. Hobbs' research interests include indigenous peoples' engagement in protected areas in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Central America; human uses of caves worldwide; Arctic climate change; sacred places; and indigenous religions of Vietnam. He is the author of BEDOUIN LIFE IN THE EGYPTIAN WILDERNESS and MOUNT SINAI (both University of Texas Press), co-author of THE BIRDS OF EGYPT (Oxford University Press) and co-editor and author of DANGEROUS HARVEST: DRUG PLANTS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF INDIGENOUS LANDSCAPES (Oxford). The recipient of the University of Missouri's highest teaching award -- the Kemper Fellowship -- Dr. Hobbs has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in world regional geography, environmental geography, the geography of the Middle East, the geography of caves, the geography of global current events, the geographies of drugs and terrorism, and geopolitics, as well as a field course on the ancient Maya geography of Belize. In summers from 1984 to 1999, he led adventure travel tours to remote areas in Latin America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Asia, Europe and the High Arctic. Dr. Hobbs received his B.A. from the University of California Santa Cruz in 1978 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980 and 1986, respectively. He and wife Cindy live with an animal menagerie in Missouri.
