Jack Swab (he/him/his) is a geographer whose work bridges human geography and geographic information science (GIS), with research in critical cartography, health geography, urban geography, queer geographies, science and technology studies, and the histories of both cartography and geographic thought. His scholarship investigates how spatial knowledge is created, communicated, and contested, with particular attention to the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts of mapping.

He is currently working on three projects. The first refines methods for collecting psychological understandings of space and place to better understand how individuals conceive of local health issues. The second project examines the political economy of American fire insurance maps from the 1850s to the 1970s, examining how conceptions of risk, social geography, and the built environment were negotiated in the fire insurance industry. His third project examines the queer geographies of the American South from the 1960s-1980s to explore how individuals shared information about queer-friendly places.

His past work has explored the changing nature of health mapping in the United States, the role of map libraries in preserving historic maps, and geography pedagogy in the undergraduate classroom. His most recent work explores the history of Census tracts in the United States, examining how social scientists worked to bound urban neighborhoods to institutionalize Census tracts across the nation.

He is active in the American Association of Geographers (AAG), where he served as Chair of the Cartography Specialty Group (2023-2024) and as the Student Counselor to the AAG’s Governing Council (2020-2022).