Chauncy Dennison Harris, a geographer with Utah ties who helped put the Soviet Union on maps when the Kremlin sought to keep it terra incognita to prying foreigners, died Friday, Dec. 26, 2003, at his home in Chicago. He was 89.
He was the Samuel N. Harper distinguished service professor of geography emeritus at the University of Chicago, which announced his death. He had been associated with the university since his student days 70 years ago, and was a faculty member from 1940 until 1984.
Mr. Harris wrote and edited geographical reference books starting with his 1940 doctoral dissertation, "Salt Lake City: A Regional Capital." But he became known internationally for his many studies of the vast expanse of the Soviet Union, while it lasted. He also produced other important work on political, economic and urban geography.
Mr. Harris was born in Logan, Utah, the son of Franklin S. Harris, an agronomy professor who became president of Brigham Young University when Chauncy was 7. He graduated from Brigham Young University at 19 in 1933, when he enrolled at the University of Chicago.
He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, earned a B.A. there in 1936, studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science and received his Ph.D. in geography at Chicago in 1940 before adding an M.A. from Oxford in 1943. He studied Russian while a geographer for the State Department in World War II.
He made 14 trips to the Soviet Union, gaining the confidence of scholars and others as a serious and objective researcher. Starting in 1949, he edited the voluminous "Economic Geography of the U.S.S.R."
More recently, he was an editor of "A Geographical Bibliography for American Libraries" (1985).