Tom Paradise

Tom Paradise is a geography and geosciences professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and the past Director of the Fulbright King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University. He was born and reared in San Francisco’s North Beach and Telegraph Hill and attended schools in the City and colleges in Nevada (mining), Georgia (cartography, geology, geography), Arizona (historic preservation, physical geography), and Italy (materials conservation, historica preservation). Since growing up in San Francisco, he has lived across the US, Italy, Morocco and Jordan, and has lived in Arkansas' Ozark Mountains since 2000.

Paradise comes from a diverse background in the environmental sciences (geology, climatology, physical geography), architecture and architectural history, Middle East and North Africa geography, and cartography - specializing in cartography and visualization and architectural deterioration research and teaching. Having researched the unique, decaying architecture of Petra, Jordan since the 1980s, he has published more than forty articles, maps, and chapters on the subject and continues to advise foreign agencies on cultural heritage management, stone architectural deterioration, cartography, and Middle Eastern and North African geography.

In the world of cartography, Professor Paradise has published more than 2000 maps for agencies, authors, and companies in the US and abroad. These cartographic projects have included thematic and reference maps for Jordan, Yemen, Arkansas, Hawai‘i, Arizona, and various US agencies. He was the cartographer, author and designer for the award-winning Atlas of Hawai‘i, and the author and cartographer of the popular Student Atlases of Hawai’i, and the new Arkansas: an Illustrated Atlas. Tom Paradise has said, “I am fortunate to love my writing, teaching, mapping, and research. As a geographer, author, and cartographer, my life is filled with teaching, writing, travelling, and learning.”

Paradise has taught abroad at Universities in Rome, Venice, Amman, as well as in the US in Georgia, Hawai’i, Arizona, California and Arkansas.