It is with sorrow that I report the death of Taoufik Agoumy in Rabat, Morocco, on July 31, 2014. Taoufik was a professor of geography in the Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences at the University Mohammed V in Rabat. He was known to many colleagues in the United States through his work in urban geography and through his years at Princeton University, where he defended his dissertation in the Department of Near Eastern Studies in December 1993 under the direction of Lawrence Rosen and Abdellah Hammoudi. His dissertation, “Housing the Urban Poor of Taza, Morocco, and the Impact of the Relocation Process,” was part of the corpus of work Taoufik distributed throughout his life between urban geography, migration studies, and anthropology. Taoufik Agoumy was born in Rabat in 1944. He received his licence in Histoire-Géographie from Mohammed V in 1971; his DEA (Diplôme des Études Approfondies) from the Institut d'Urbanisme de Créteil (Paris XI) in 1974, and his Doctorat de Troisième Cycle from the Université François Rabelais in Tours in 1979 under the direction of J.-F. Troin.
In the 1970s, Taoufik began his career as a high school geography teacher and was quickly spotted by the Ministry of Education for his excellence and thus became one of the first Moroccan inspectors of History and Geography. Following his Doctorat de Troisième Cycle, in 1980 Taoufik joined the faculty of the Department of Geography at Mohammed V as Maître Assistant. Taoufik was promoted to Maître de Conférence in 1994 and Professeur de l'Enseignement Supérieur in 1998. He also served as chair of his department from 1994 to 1996 and was a key member of the Association Nationale de Géographie du Maroc. Taoufik was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, the Technischen Universität München, and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He was also a four-time Fulbright Scholar (Princeton: 1988, 1989–1993, 2002, and Montana State: 2006). In view of his many contributions to higher education and to the spirit of the Fulbright mission of the “mutual understanding of peoples,” the Moroccan Fulbright Alumni Association dedicated its 2014 annual meeting as an “Homage à Taoufik Agoumy” on 6 December 2014 at the Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc.
