Herod named Regents' Professor

Two University of Georgia faculty members, including Franklin College professor Andrew Herod, have been named Regents’ Professors in recognition of their innovative and pace-setting research. The honor is the highest professorial recognition bestowed by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents.

The university’s 2025 Regents’ Professors are Andrew Herod, Distinguished Research Professor in the department of geography in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences; and M. Stephen Trent, UGA Foundation Distinguished Professor in the department of infectious diseases in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Herod describes himself as a human geographer and political economist who’s interested in how economic landscapes are made. He is widely considered the world’s foremost expert in the field of labor geography, which he helped create in the 1990s.

“It is no exaggeration to say that Dr. Herod has been one of the most important voices of his generation in the broad interdiscipline that is human geography,” said Jamie Peck, Distinguished University Scholar and professor of geography at the University of British Columbia. “There are not many who can lay claim to the formation and shaping of an entirely new subfield in their home discipline.”

Herod’s research projects have ranged from exploring how U.S. dock workers adapted to technological innovations in the 1950s, noting how Western labor unions worked with their counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s to help rebuild the region’s economies, and studying the impact of COVID-19 on labor markets. His most recent book, “Industry 4.0 and the Future of Work,” was published in 2024. In the book, Herod and his co-authors examine the changing nature of work, the increasing production of waste and the interdependence of these factors in a circular economy.

In 2023, Herod was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, presented annually by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to scientists, writers, scholars and artists “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

Congratulations to both of these wonderfully deserving colleagues.

 Image: Andrew Herod.