Chart an extraordinary journey through culture and technology. Continue to explore the world of maps in this three-part lecture series, the second half of a six-part series presented by The Field Museum and the Newberry Library. Speakers include an artist, a literary scholar, historians, cartographers and an anthropologist.
Lectures take place at the Newberry Library on Saturdays, January 12, 19, and 26, 2008 at 11 am and are free.
The following lectures are supported in part by the Geographic Society of Chicago.
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Ricardo Padrón |
Saturday, January 12, 11 am
Speaker: Ricardo Padrón, University of Virginia
Cartography, the science of making accurate maps, was still in its infancy during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. This meant that one of the great historical endeavors of that period - the discovery and conquest of the Americas by Spain - was carried out using "maps" that were more often verbal than pictorial. Padrón identifies cartographic sensibilities within sixteenth-century epic poems, explorers' travel accounts, and other literary texts and demonstrates how these verbal maps are better understood as extensions of medieval than as modern ways of conceptualizing and representing space.
Admission is free. No reservation is required.
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| Alessandro Scafi |
Saturday, January 19, 11 am
Speaker: Alessandro Scafi, The Warburg Institute, University of London
When early Christians adopted the Hebrew Bible with its story of Genesis, the Garden of Eden became for them a paradise on earth, situated in real geography and indicated on maps. In Mapping Paradise, Alessandro Scafi explores medieval intellectual conditions that made mapping paradise possible. He also accounts for the transformations in theological doctrine and cartographic practice that eroded belief in a terrestrial paradise and led to historical and regional mapping of the Garden of Eden, beginning in the Reformation and continuing today.
Admission is free. No reservation is required.
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| Ruth Watson |
Saturday, January 26, 11 am
Speaker: Ruth Watson, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Ruth Watson is a New Zealand/Australian artist and a prizewinning scholar in historical geography. For more than fifteen years, her art has focused on how maps construct our ideas of the globe. In an illustrated talk, she will discuss how she has used salt, images of her tongue, and other unconventional media to create works of art based on the cordiform, a heart-shaped projection of the globe developed in the sixteenth century.
Admission is free. No reservation is required.
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| Dutton, Atlas (1882) |
Saturday, February 16, 1:30 pm
Speaker: Diane Dillon, The Newberry Library
To chart the vast reaches of the American West in the nineteenth century, the Federal government sponsored a series of scientific expeditions. As part of the surveys, mapmakers, photographers, and painters worked alongside scientists to document the landscape. Team members often influenced one another, producing topographical paintings and photographs and artistic maps. The co-curator of Mapping Manifest Destiny explains how these images worked together to create a comprehensive picture of the region, to plan military campaigns and transportation routes, to exploit natural resources, and to promote settlement, commerce, and tourism.
Admission is free. No reservation is required.
The Newberry Library
Center for Public Programs
60 West Walton Street
Chicago, IL 60610-7324
telephone: (312) 255-3700
fax: (312) 255-3680
e-mail: programs@newberry.org