Joseph J. Hobbs received his B.A. at the University of California Santa Cruz in 1978 and his M.A and Ph.D. at the University of Texas-Austin in 1980 and 1986. He is a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and a geographer of the Middle East with many years of field research on biogeography and Bedouin peoples in the deserts of Egypt. Hobbs's interests in the region grew from a boyhood lived in Saudi Arabia and India. His research in Egypt has been supported by Fulbright fellowships, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration. He served as the team leader of the Bedouin Support Program, a component of the St. Katherine National Park project in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. His current research interests are indigenous peoples participation in protected areas in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central America; human uses of caves worldwide; and the global narcotics trade. He is the author of BEDOUIN LIFE IN THE EGYPTIAN WILDERNESS and MOUNT SINAI (both University of Texas Press), co-author of THE BIRDS OF EGYPT (Oxford University Press), and co-editor of DANGEROUS HARVEST: DRUG PLANTS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF INDIGENOUS LANDSCAPES (Oxford). He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in world regional geography, environmental geography, the geography of the Middle East, the geography of caves, the geography of global current events, the geographies of drugs and terrorism, and a field course on the ancient Maya geography of Belize. He has received the University of Missouri's highest teaching award, the Kemper Fellowship. In summers from 1984 to 1999, he led ""adventure travel"" tours to remote areas in Latin America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Asia, Europe, and the High Arctic. Hobbs lives in Missouri with his wife Cindy, daughters Katherine and Lily, and an animal menagerie.