Ph.D., Department of Geography (2010)
University of Washington (Seattle, WA)
Juris Doctor (2003)
Cornell University Law School (Ithaca, NY)
Certificate in International and Comparative Human Rights Law (2001)
National University of Ireland/Galway & New England School of Law (Galway, Ireland)
Bachelor of Arts (1996)
Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY)
Major: Geography. Secondary concentration: International Economics
Dr. Carmalt's research and teaching focus on geography, international law and society, and human rights. Her scholarship focuses on Critical Geographies of Human Rights, and she has written about how geography and human rights intersect in relation to the right to health, UN human rights processes, and environmental disasters. Her work can be found in journals such as the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Human Rights Quarterly, Progress in Human Geography, and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, as well as in edited volumes by Cambridge University Press, Routledge, and Oxford University Press. In addition to teaching within the Law and Society major at John Jay, she is a member of the Earth and Environmental Sciences faculty at CUNY's Graduate Center.
LWS 200: Introduction to Law and Society
LWS 425: Colloquium for Research in Law and Society
LWS 380: Special Topics in Law and Society (Food for Thought)
POL 320: International Human Rights
EES 704: Nature of Scientific Research
EES 799: Critical Geographies of Human Rights
HR 700: Introduction to Human Rights
Law and Society Association, member
American Association of Geographers, member
Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs, board member
Carmalt, JC (2019). Critical geographies of human rights and the spatial dimensions of international law violations in Rakhine State, Myanmar. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 109(6), 1829-1844.
Carmalt, JC (2018). Neoliberal geographies and the justiciability of health as a human right. In Gillian MacNaughton and Diane Frey Frey (Eds), Economic and Social Rights in a Neoliberal World (304-322). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Carmalt, JC (2017). For critical geographies of human rights. Progress in Human Geography, 42(6),847-861.
Carmalt, JC (2014). Prioritizing Health: A Human Rights Analysis of Disaster, Vulnerability, and Urbanization in New Orleans and Port au Prince. Health and Human Rights 16(1), 1-15.
Carmalt, JM (2007). Rights and Place: Using Geography in Human Rights Work. Human Rights Quarterly 29(1), 68-85.
2019 (with Michael Yarbrough & Jamie Longazel) Presidential Student-Faculty Research Award for the project Diversity, Inequality and Law in the Global City of New York: Preliminary Research for an Externally Funded Project in the Law and Society Major.
2017 Runner-up, Kwando Kinshasa Mentor Award. John Jay College of Criminal Justice McNair Program.
2016 Kwando Kinshasa Mentor Award. John Jay College of Criminal Justice McNair Program.
2009-10 AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship
My research looks at the intersection between geography, injustice, and international human rights law. In particular, I am interested in the spatial dimension of injustice, and how injustice is something that happens through physical or material processes. Geographers assume that physical space is shaped by a large variety of human activities: space is created, and it in turn prompts action; it is not simply a backdrop onto which human activity is inscribed. Therefore, my work starts with this assumption and asks how geography and injustice create one another, particularly in reference to human rights law.