Lines on a Map: Crafting and Contesting Borders in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond
Dates: 13-14 December, 2019
Location: London, United Kingdom
For over a century, scholars have wrestled with how to imagine, explain, and convey geographical space. From Frederick Jackson Turner’s chronologically shifting frontier to Fernand Braudel’s integrated Mediterranean basin, from concepts of an ‘Atlantic’ world to arguments for an enduring ‘Red’ North American continent, scholars have offered various models for understanding the interrelationship between space and time, and people and their environments—whether on land-locked interiors, blue water empires, or the bays, estuaries, rivers, and coastlines that connect water and land.
This conference asks participants to analyse their own assumptions about and models of early modern historical spaces by engaging with and interrogating how actors themselves described, drew, and defined geographic spaces—whether discrete urban vistas, vast colonial projects, regional chorographies, interiors unmapped (by Europeans), or ever-changing maritime and riverine waters. The ways in which actors defined scale, bounded their maps and descriptions, imagined the unknown, and projected their own understandings onto spaces provide a rich archive for examining how early modern actors defined and contested space, boundaries, and border-making.
This conference is the last of three that Dr Rachel Herrmann is running with Dr Jessica Roney (Temple University) as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council network. Accepted, confirmed panelists include:
Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez Lucia Bergamasco Michael Borsk Max Edelson Travis Glasson Edward Gray Harald Gropp Lawrence Hatter April Lee Hatfield Rachel Herrmann Alice King Christian Koot Kris Lane John Nelson Bertie Mandelblatt Emily Mann Marilia Moreira John Morton Paul Musselwhite Mark Peterson Charles Prior Karen Rann Alyssa Reichardt Jessica Roney Linda Rupert Erling Sandmo Nancy Shoemaker Samuel Truett Djoeke Van Netten Alex Zukas
A programme and information about registration will follow soon.
Rachel B. Herrmann 