Michael Dear, professor, city and regional planning

Michael Dear is a professor in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. The author/editor of more than a dozen books, he has been a Guggenheim Fellowship holder, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and Fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy.

Dear has received the highest honors for creativity and excellence in research from the Association of American Geographers, and numerous undergraduate teaching and graduate mentorship awards. He has also curated numerous exhibitions, including most recently Trazando la Línea/Tracing the Line at the Centro Estatal de las Artes in Mexicali, the state capital of Baja California.

His current research focuses on comparative urbanism, and the future of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. His latest book, Why Walls Don't Work: Repairing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Oxford U Press, 2013), traces the long history of cultural interaction across the U.S.-Mexico border zone.