Richard Nisa

Richard Nisa is a political and historical geographer, affliated faculty in Architecture, and Special Faculty in the IDeATe Program where he has the title of Program Lead in Sustainability. As of Fall 2024, Nisa is the Assoicate Dean of IDeATe. 

His work is situated at the intersection of infrastructure, technology and architecture in an array of historical and political contexts. Rich’s current book project, The Global Capture Chain: Infrastructures of U.S.-Managed Military Detainment from Truman to Trump (under contract with the University of Minnesota Press), examines the tensions between intimately-scaled spatial encounters on the battlefield and multiple transnational systems—from international law to computerization to low-cost air travel—that give shape to an expansive U.S. military-carcerality. An interdisciplinary scholar, his work has been published in texts as varied as the edited volume Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data and the Journal of Historical Geography. He co-edited an issue of Radical History Review on the political lives of infrastructure and has recently written on how automated weapons draw attention to the entwined logics of care and violence in international humanitarian law. 

Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, Rich was an associate professor of geography in the Department of Social Sciences and History at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Florham Campus, where he was named the 2018 Becton College Teacher of the Year and earned the 2019 Outstanding Honors Faculty Award. He has also had transformative teaching experiences (through the NJSTEP program) inside three New Jersey prisons, where he ran courses exploring the history of mass surveillance.

Rich earned a PhD in geography from Rutgers University, where he was trained in urban geography and political ecology. He holds a BArch from the Syracuse University School of Architecture, where he won a James A. Britton Memorial Prize for Outstanding Thesis. He is currently the Chair of the Urban Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers.