Dr. Eric Spears is the Mildred Miller Fort Foundation Eminent Scholar and Chair of International Education at Columbus State University (CSU) in Georgia, where he is also Professor of Geography in the Department of History, Geography, and Philosophy. He serves as executive director of the Center for Global Engagement, coordinates and teaches in CSU's International Studies Certificate Program, and heads Spencer House, the university's study abroad center in Oxford, England, run in partnership with the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University.
Spears was elected chair of the System Council of International Education at the University System of Georgia (2023-2026), which coordinates international education policy across the system's 25 public colleges and universities. He also sits on the USG's Regents Advisory Committee on Geological Sciences and Geography.
Spears trained as a geographer across three countries: the United States, England, and Brazil. In Brazil, he spent fifteen months collecting field data in favelas, studying democratic participation and the political economy of urban development, and later grew into a collaboration with João dos Reis Silva Jr. at the Federal University of São Carlos examining neoliberalism's effects on scientific knowledge production inside Brazil's public university system. A Fulbright grant took him to South Korea, and an East-West Center Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP) grant in Hawai'i supported the creation of a course on China and an Asian studies minor at Mercer University.
Service runs alongside the research. Spears works with the Georgia Rotary Student Program, which brings international students to Georgia for year-long exchanges, and served as President of the ASDP Alumni Organization at the East-West Center (2024-2026). He previously served on the Lam Institute for East-West Studies Executive Board at Hong Kong Baptist University (2006–2010). Spears currently sits on the CEPA Foundation's academic advisory board in Strasbourg (France) and the geology and geography visiting committee at West Virginia University. Locally, he served on the Columbus mayor's Commission on International Relations and Cultural Liaison Encounters, which oversees the city's sister-city relationships.
In 2024, he co-authored Cartographic America (Tapestry Series, CSU Press) with David Owings, a study of the Spencer Map Collection, which is a $1.2 million set of antique maps spanning the 1500s to the late 1800s that document North America's early exploration, colonial conquest, and the Southeast's regional history. It was his first venture into historical geography, and proceeds support the CSU Foundation's archives.
Spears is currently completing "Reproducing São Paulo: Memory, Place, and Power," which argues that São Paulo's urban landscape reveals how spaces of repression from Brazil's military dictatorship have been reworked, erased, or commodified under neoliberal urbanism.
That same question, who controls space, and how, now drives Spears's current book project on the geopolitics of maritime chokepoints. Tracing an arc from the empire-era engineering of the Panama and Suez canals to the revisionist pressures reshaping the Baltic and the South China Sea, he examines how narrow waters have always concentrated outsized geopolitical stakes. Along the way, he takes up the contested legal status of the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab, where fragile littoral politics and ambiguous maritime law turn freedom of navigation from a legal technicality into a live flashpoint.
