Courses
Dr Toal taught undergraduate and graduate students for ten years in Blacksburg before moving to Washington DC in 1999 where he teaches only graduate students. His courses are in the Government and International Affairs program but are cross-listed with Political Science (online only), and Urban Affairs and Planning. Each Fall and Spring semester he teaches a 15 week in-person seminar on Contemporary American Foreign Policy and Critical Geopolitics at Virginia Tech’s National Capital Region campus in Old Town. He also teaches graduate level courses through Virginia Tech Online on Global Conflicts and Discourse Analysis.
For Spring 2011 Dr Toal is on sabbatical.
Masters Graduate Supervision
Each year Dr Toal serves as the primary advisor for MPIA students completing their Major Papers. These papers are normally directly related to topics covered in Dr Toal’s courses. Below are a list of his supervisions in 2010.
“The Practical Geopolitical Reasoning of Richard Holbrooke: Making the case for US support for United Nations intervention in the DRC.” Mindi R. Mebane. Graduated May 2010, MPIA.
A Quasi-state in East Africa? A Portrait of Puntland. Pablo Ricardo Paldao. Graduated May 2010, MPIA.
“Visualizing Superpower Invasions: The Photographic Framing of Soviet and US Intervention in Afghanistan in TIME magazine.” Walter Frederick Landgraf III, Graduated December 2010, MPIA.
“The Transformation of National Identification: How Japan Became Part of the West.” Atsuko Watanabe. Graduated December 2010.
“Protectors, Wimps and Macho Men: A Feminist Analysis of the 1989 U.S. Invasion of Panama.” Sandra M. Soriano, Graduated December 2010.
“The Georgian-Abkhaz War of 1992-93: A Narrative Based Multicausal Argument.” Matthew Osterrieder. Graduated December 2010.
“Moscow Disaggregated and Localized: The Role of the Soviet and Russian States in the 1991-1992 Georgia-South Ossetia War.” Christopher Lee Walker. Graduated December 2010.
Ph D Supervision
Dr Toal is currently the supervisor of a group of Ph D students in the Planning, Governance and Globalization (PG&G) program in Alexandria, Virginia. Most but not all are pursuing their Ph D on a part-time basis. A Ph D is not for everyone. To help you decide if you’d like to join this group, please read the statement on Ph D supervision below. If your interest area is not listed, you may not be a good match. Please note also that Virginia Tech rarely provides funding for Ph D students. Currently, Dr Toal has been able to successfully fund one Ph D student using a National Science Foundation grant.
Publications on Undergraduate Teaching
In the mid 1990s Dr Toal was one of the first to use internet resources in the undergraduate teaching of global conflicts. Out of this experience came two publications which he wrote with his then graduate assistant, Derek McCormack, who is now a Lecturer in Geography at Oxford University in England.
G. Ó Tuathail, D. McCormack, “The Technoliteracy Challenge: Teaching Globalization Using the Internet.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 22 (1999), 347-361.
G. Ó Tuathail, D. McCormack, “Global Conflicts On-Line: Technoliteracy and the Development of an Internet Based Conflict Archive.” Journal of Geography 97 (1998), 1-22.
