28 Nov 2024, Luz Martin del Campo (City University of New York, Vernacular environmental cartographies – landscapes and navigation unseen in Lacanjá Chansayab, Chiapas, México
30 Jan 2025, Tania Rossetto and Laura Lo Presti (Università degli Studi di Padova) in conversation with Elizabeth Baigent (School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford), Map Readings – ‘Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities’
13 Feb 2025, Margriet Hoogvliet and Anouk de Vries (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Discussing decolonising cartographic heritage: theory, maps, and Dutch Brazil
15 May 2025, Carolina Martínez (Universidad Nacional de San Martín-CONICET, Argentina), Trans-Pacific maritime routes and Peruvian agency in three 17th-century nautical atlases
29 May 2025, Petter Hellström (Uppsala Universitet), Unmapping Africa in the Age of the Enlightenment
12 June 2025, Jean-Marc Besse (L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), Geography and Catholic censorship in Europe at the end of the sixteenth-century
Stanford (California),
USAOrganisation: Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), David Rumsey Map Center, History Department, Stanford University LibrariesThe OpenGulf research collective, which examines and repurposes colonial texts to explore the histories of understudied regions, will host a symposium at the David Rumsey Map Center on Friday, May 23. The symposium marks the publication of a comprehensive dataset of geocoded place names derived from a seminal twentieth-century British colonial Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Arabian Peninsula, and Oman. More information and registration here.Time schedule: 18.00-21.00 Brussels time
Edinburgh,
ScotlandCartographic technologies and sciences underwent revolutionary transformations during the global Cold War (1945-1989) as military officers, scientists, governments, private corporations, universities, and think tanks sought to define and adapt to global political and historical contexts. New technologies, including radar navigation, satellite imagery, the World Geodetic System, and GPS, met the demands of new kinds of global warfare, including counter-insurgency, but also were redeployed to serve civilian and developmental ends of the Cold War.
In regions like Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the Cold War was anything but ‘cold’, cartographic technologies played a crucial role in defining battlefields as military and paramilitary forces sought to control and conquer territory and to eradicate armed insurgents, while those same insurgents used their knowledge of local urban and rural geographies to remain hidden from the eyes of the state. Development poles in “unexploited frontier regions” demonstrate how cartographic practices shaped labor dynamics, social structures, and environmental transformations through state-driven industrialization and mega-infrastructure projects.
In addition to technological innovations that shaped military strategies, surveillance efforts, and developmentalist aims, maps and visual imagery, such as aerial photographs and satellite imagery, also exerted a crucial rhetorical force in the ideological battlefields of the Cold War. Policymakers, environmentalists, social movements, and others used new ways of representing space to articulate different worldviews and imagined futures. Alternative approaches -like the Peters projection- challenged Eurocentric cartographic representations while simultaneously reinforcing certain development narratives about the "Third World." Medical geography and disease mapping created visual discourses that reinforced divisions between First and Third Worlds, functioning as "immutable mobiles" that carried both scientific information and ideological messages across contexts. Meanwhile, UN development cartography navigated tensions between scientific internationalism and national security concerns, often perpetuating colonial power dynamics under the guise of development. These new maps and technologies also shaped novel ideas about the boundaries between national and international space and guided efforts to remake national territorial sovereignty and empire amid decolonization and globalization. Finally, technology, knowledge, and images also moved across space through intellectual exchanges and debates that crossed the north and south, east and west in ways that defied notions of 'technological transfer.'
This workshop and proposed edited volume will seek to define a transdisciplinary and global field of Cold War cartography by generating a new set of questions, debates, and theoretical frameworks for analyzing the history of cartographic technologies and maps during the Cold War.
We invite scholars to submit proposals (300 words) on any aspect of cartographic sciences and technologies during the Cold War. In particular, we are interested in scholars from diverse career stages, and who reside in the global south.
Potential topics may include:
Analyzing the relationship between new kinds of geographic knowledge, technologies, and the generation of new ideas of territory and sovereignty
Assessing the use of cartographic technologies in counter-insurgency, political violence, armed conflicts
Investigating the relationship between cartographic practices and natural resource exploration and exploitation, particularly in the context of infrastructure and megaprojects
Analyzing the role of international bodies, such as the United Nations or the Pan-American Geography and History Association, in promoting new mapping technologies
Exploring how medical geography and disease mapping reinforced Cold War divisions between 'developed' and 'developing' nations
Analyzing the environmental impacts of development cartography in “frontier regions”
Investigating how cartographic practices contributed to the fragmentation or reorganization of labor structures in Cold War contexts
Examining the use of maps or visual imagery as part of global Cold War ideological debates
Examining alternative map projections -such as the Peters projection- as sites of ideological contestation
Comparing how similar cartographic practices and technologies produced different social, environmental, and political outcomes across regions
Exploring the legacy of Cold War cartographic practices on contemporary spatial representation and digital mapping technologies
We particularly welcome comparative studies that examine how cartographic practices produced different social, environmental, and political outcomes across regions such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and other parts of the Global South. Accepted papers will be invited to participate in workshop held at the University of Edinburgh in May 2026.
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London,
UKOrganisation: Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore London SW7 (Entrance Exhibition Road)The largest Antique Map Fair in Europe, established 1980.URL: https://www.londonmapfairs.com/
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Paris,
FranceThe work of Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625-1712) in the field of astronomical science took place at a time marked by the development of instruments, new methods of observation, new theories and the emergence of scientific institutions. From his first publications in the 1660s and throughout his years at the Paris Observatory, J. D. Cassini was a key figure in these developments. This symposium takes the opportunity of the 400th anniversary of the astronomer's birth to take stock of current research into this major contribution.
More information on the webpage of the symposium.Venue: Observatoire de Paris. 61, avenue de l’Observatoire, F-75014 PARISBrussels Map Circle event
Sint-Niklaas,
BelgiumOrganisation: STeMClimate scientists and activists warn us not only with words, but also with maps, showing how in the near future sea levels will rise due to melting ice. In this lecture, we go back in the history of Arctic cartography, and Djoeke van Netten analyses how mapmakers in the early modern era visualised the High North. In a way, the North Pole was invented in the 16th century, when mapmakers like Ruysch, Waldseemüller and Mercator experimented with different projections to get the round globe on a flat sheet of paper. This story is about shape, and especially the consistency of the Arctic according to the maps, was there land or sea there, in frozen or liquid form? And how did that change when Western Europeans started sailing north? They did not find the hoped-for route to China, but what they did ‘discover’ had a great impact on cartography. In the end, it took until the early 20th century for the first human to stand at the North Pole, so all that time before that, maps were made of territory no one had ever seen! The end of the lecture goes to our modern times, what can we learn from early modern mapmakers? Both then and now, cartographers aim to warn and inspire, presenting a world largely born of imagination.Venue: Museumpaviljoen - STeMLanguage: DutchTime schedule: 20.00URL: https://www.museasintniklaas.be/activiteiten/mercatorlezing-[...]
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Bologna,
ItalyOn the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Domenico Cassini, born in Perinaldo (Italy) on 8 June 1625, we would like to remember the most illustrious astronomer of his time: his studies had such an impact beyond national borders that in 1669 the Sun King, Louis XIV, asked him to found the Observatoire de Paris, the first modern astronomical observatory.
More information on this page
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Paris,
FranceOrganisation: ISHMAPThe International Society for the History of the Map (ISHMap) announces its VII Symposium and III Workshop that will take place in Campus Condorcet (Aubervilliers), Paris, France, from 8 to 11 July 2025. Symposium is organized in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary laboratory Géographie-cités (member of French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)).
More information here
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Portland (Maine),
USAOrganisation: Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education in PortlandThe Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education in Portland, Maine, will host the 2025 conference, showcasing their extensive collections dating back to 1475, and utilizing the facilities of the University of Southern Maine, including the newly built McGoldrick Center for Student and Career Success.URL: https://www.imcos.org/6826-2/
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Rome,
ItalyOrganisation: The Historical Wall Maps Research GrouThe Historical Wall Maps Research Group, an international collective of historians and geographers dedicated to advancing the study of modern historical wall maps, is pleased to announce a call for papers for the workshop "Hang Them Up! New Perspectives on Historical Wall Maps Studies," which will take place on October 8-9, 2025, at the Società Geografica Italiana in Rome.
The main aim of the event is to bring together experts from different fields to explore the historical and comparative dimensions of wall maps, their cultural significance and impact on geographical knowledge across different periods and regions, and finally the possibilities for their preservation and digitization.
More information here.Venue: Società Geografica ItalianaLanguage: English
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Chicago and online,
USAOrganisation: The Newberry Library
Mapping from Mexico: New Narratives for the History of Cartography
The 2025 Nebenzahl Lectures continue to promote new thinking in map history by asking how orienting our stories from Mexico, looking out toward the rest of the world, challenges common narratives and popular assumptions in the history of mapmaking. Despite the prominent role mapping in Mexico has played, cartographic histories are often told from a European perspective. But how do the stories we tell, methodological assumptions we make, and categories we define about maps and map history change when we treat sites of production and reception in Mexico—from Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Puebla to the borderlands—with the same specificity map history has given to European centers?
Program and information are to be found here.
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Hobart,
TasmaniaOrganisation: Australian and New Zealand Map Society This event will explore how cartography has shaped exploration and knowledge of the Southern Hemisphere, from early speculative maps to modern technologies. Discussions will examine the challenges, innovations, and lasting impacts of mapping some of the world’s most remote and extreme regions across the hemisphere’s vast oceans.URL: https://anzmaps.org/
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Denver, Colorado,
USAOrganisation: Society for the History of DiscoversMountains have long fascinated people of all varieties, acting as sites of exploration, conflict, and discovery. From the famed Mount Olympus of the Greek gods to the Rocky Mountains of the final frontier, and to the fantastical mountains found in cartography, they have mystified and captivated, both halting and encouraging progress.URL: https://discoveryhistory.org/Meetings-&-ConferencesBrussels Map Circle event
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Liège,
BelgiumOrganisation: BIMCCOur next excursion, focusing on geological mapping, will take place in Liège. The programme includes visits to the Belgian Geological Society, CLADIC (Liège Coal Industry Archives and Documentation Centre), city tour of Liège, State archives and Castle of Warfusée. Download here the provisional invitation.
Please register before 30 September using this form.
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Winston-Salem, NC,
USA and onlineAs a young nation emerged, Americans quickly turned their attention to the West, continuing to expand westward in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the Louisiana Purchase, Mexican Cession, and other land deals. As they did so, they utilized maps to chart their course and realize their vision of an expanded America.
More information and registration can be found here.Venue: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts
Paris,
FranceOrganisation: History Commission of the French Cartography CommitteeThis one-day symposium is a continuation of the previous meetings on ‘Art and Cartography’ (2023) and ‘Cartography and Cinema’ (2024), in which cartography and its history were examined from the angle of their presence in modern and contemporary visual cultures. The aim of this new day is to consider the various aspects of the encounter between cartography and the general public.
Maps have long been exhibited, more or less permanently, in the galleries of major palaces and public buildings. Think, for example, of the Vatican Map Gallery or the world map room in the Farnese Palace in Caprarola. But it is not to these perennial cartographic settings, which are already well known, that this Study Day aims to focus its analysis, but rather on temporary installations.
Since the nineteenth century, cartography has been the focus of a great many temporary exhibitions, both specialist and more general. Like works of art or scientific objects, maps, globes, models, relief maps and observation instruments were considered worthy of public interest. Take, for example, the enthusiastic response to the exhibition entitled ‘Cartes et figures de la Terre' [Maps and Figures of the Earth], presented at the Centre Pompidou in 1980. Exhibitions devoted to the history of cartography, or certain aspects of it, are regularly held at scientific gatherings (geography congresses or learned societies), at international fairs and, of course, in libraries, museums and archive centres.Venue: INHA (Paris) - Salle Vasari
