The 40th volume of Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies focuses exclusively on geographers from the Global South. For the first time in the serial's history, the entire volume is devoted to geographers who were born or who lived in South America and is combined with an editorial which roots their lives and careers in the context of the Global South more generally. These geographers' biobibliographies, which consider their personal and professional trajectories and encounters, deepen our understanding of geography as a whole, and raise important wider questions of the scope and place of Southern scholarship. This volume includes meticulously detailed volumes on five of the most prominent and ground-breaking geographers in the Global South, including:

- The Argentinian geographer Elina González Acha de Correa Morales, who was the first woman to apply for membership of the Argentinean Geographical Institute in 1888 and who played an important role in developing geographical science in Argentina
- The Brazilian geographer Bernardino de Souza, active in Brazil in the late nineteenth century as a secretary of the Geographical and Historical Institute of Bahia
- The Portuguese scholar Jaime Zuzarte Cortesão, Director of the National Library of Portugal, who was exiled in Brazil between 1940 and 1957 and greatly influenced research into the exploration and mapping of South America.
- The Brazilian geographer Josué Apolônio de Castro who was a member of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation's international advisory group on nutrition during the 1940s and the 1950s
- The late twentieth-century Brazilian geographer Antônio Carlos Robert Moraes, who was a key figure in the circulation of critical approaches in Brazilian geography

Together these biobibliographies allow the reader to focus on the Global South as a place of geographical knowledge production, translation and reception, enlarging our discipline's histories. The volume also links the serial firmly to wider debates on decolonisation and post colonialism and is the latest manifestation of the editorial drive to broaden the serial's reach and impact and to consolidate its place as an important vehicle in narrating geography's international story.

André Reyes Novaes is an Associate Professor at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is currently an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Geography at the Royal Holloway University of London and a member of the commission on the history of geography at the International Geographical Union.
Elizabeth Baigent is University Reader in the History of Geography at the University of Oxford, UK. She is Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Higher Education Academy.