Malcolm L. Comeaux served as professor of geography at Arizona State University from 1969-2001. His scholarly specialties include cultural diffusion and change, historical geography, geography of Europe, history of geographic thought, geography of Arizona and the Southwest, the French of Louisiana and geographic education. He published widely on Cajun material culture, society and economy, cemetery landscapes and post-death removal of human remains. He authored "Atchafalaya Swamp Life: Settlement" and "Folk Occupations and Arizona: A Geography."
He devoted years of action, energy and loyalty to the establishment of the School of Geographical Sciences as an international center for geographic learning.Beyond his considerable accomplishments in research and teaching, his greatest institutional legacy may be his founding and leading the Arizona Geographic Alliance, a K-12 educational outreach initiative that has significantly enhanced the teaching of geography and enriched the lives of thousands of Arizona's school children and teachers.
Building and strengthening the Geography community in Arizona has been a life long passion for Malcolm. His steadfast support of scholarly gatherings has included weekly school colloquia, the school forum, brown bag series, invited lectures across campus, professional meetings and educator conferences. The School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University has chosen to honor Professor Comeaux's 32 years of service and dedication to the dissemination of new geographic knowledge by establishing the Malcolm L. Comeaux Lecture Endowment to support an annual public lecture at ASU by a leading geographer. This endowment was established in 2001 and provides support in perpetuity to bring a distinguished scholar to the ASU campus each year to speak to a broad audience of faculty, students, alumni and friends of the department on exciting new directions in geography.
This lecture endowment honors Malcolm Comeaux's work as a scholar, teacher and institution builder.
2026 Malcolm L. Comeaux Lecture
Park Williams, UCLA, "Why have we lost control of wildfire in the western United States?"
📅 Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026
⏰ Reception: 4:30 p.m. | Tribute and lecture: 5-6:30 p.m.
📍 ASU Tempe campus, Memorial Union, Alumni Room 202
💻 ASU Live
This year’s lecture will include a special tribute honoring the life and legacy of Malcolm L. Comeaux.
Lecture abstract: Over the past four decades, the annual area burned by wildfires in the western U.S. has more than tripled, driven largely by a tenfold increase in forest-fire area. Forest fires have become not only larger but also more severe and the explosive rise in western U.S. forest-fire activity has occurred despite humanity’s best efforts to suppress it. In this talk, Williams will draw on observations and modeling to explain the various processes and their interactions that have driven the rapid increase toward increasingly large, severe and dangerous wildfires. Parks will conclude with a discussion of where our greatest uncertainties lie in terms of how western U.S. wildfire activity and its impacts on humans will continue to change and how scientists can help.
About the speaker: Park Williams is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Williams is a hydroclimatologist who studies the causes and consequences of hydrological extremes, particularly drought. His research advances understanding of hydroclimatology while also examining how these extremes affect life on Earth. He is especially interested in how human-caused climate change is altering the hydrological cycle, ecosystems and human societies through events such as heat waves, wildfires and floods.