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Call for Papers - Special Issue on Jesuit Cartography, August 2018

As witnessed by the recent exhibition of the world maps of Matteo Ricci and Ferdinand Verbiest at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Jesuit cartography still arouses public curiosity centuries after the maps were made. While Jesuit science and mathematics have been the subject of much study, especially in the context of East Asia, the broader and more diverse practices of Jesuit cartography around the world have proven more elusive. At the same time, significant scholarly and public interest remains about both the nature of Jesuit cartography and the longer-term influence it had on the process of imagining localities, nations, empires and cosmologies. Is there coherence to the category 'Jesuit cartography'? If so, what created this coherence aside from the Jesuit order itself? How did Jesuit cartography emerge in tandem with indigenous mapping traditions? And finally, why did Jesuit cartography have such important effects on both national and global scales?
The Journal of Jesuit Studies seeks to publish an issue devoted to Jesuit Cartography that will include an overview of the current state of the field of Jesuit cartography along with six topical articles in August 2018. Abstracts of proposed submissions should be 500 words or less, and are due by Friday 19 May 2017. Full articles should be approximately 7000 words, including footnotes, and will be due by 1 October 2017. A summary article and bibliography by the issue editor on the historiography of Jesuit cartography will be available to contributors.
Contributions might focus on particular maps, cosmological or geographical mapping, particular cartographers and groups of cartographers, mapping and printing techniques, indirect influences of Jesuit mapping in places like Korea, Russia or Japan or on cartographic techniques in places with Jesuit schools like France, transcultural cooperation in creating and disseminating maps, maps as establishing relations between fields of study (cartography and mathematics, linguistics, natural history, aesthetics, or religion), and institutional practices as observatories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among other topics. Papers that combine novel archival work and a broader engagement with conceptual or theoretical approaches to Jesuit cartography are especially welcome. Geographic diversity and use of comparative approaches to different regions will factor into considerations of the issue as a whole. Potential contributors should consult the comparative, historical and critical approaches pioneered in J. B. Harley and David Woodward's The History of Cartography (1987+) as well as J. B. Harley's seminal article The Map as Mission (1991), more recent work on the sociology of knowledge and science, and/or data- and simulation-driven digital humanities and historical geography models as baselines for methodology. All papers will be published in English, although help with translation can be arranged.
Color and black and white images are possible and should be tentatively proposed with the abstract as a list (separate from the word count). Acquisition of publication-quality image files and rights to reproduce are the responsibility of the author. A permanent website resource separate from the journal will be available to contributors who wish to publish extra reference images.
The Journal of Jesuit Studies is published in cooperation with the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College. It has four issues per year, three of which are thematic and one of which is open JJS is published by Brill and is peer reviewed, fully open access and is part of Reuters Thomson Web of Science Indexing (see http://www.brill.com/products/journal/journal-jesuit-studies). Questions about the issue and abstract submissions should be addressed to Robert Batchelor, batchelo@georgiasouthern.edu.
Robert Batchelor, Professor of History and Director of Digital Humanities, Georgia Southern University
Forest Drive Building (Office 1211, 5539 Forest Drive)
PO 8054
Statesboro, GA 30460.

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