Delaware scholar to explore rise of cartography in 19th century

“American Map Wars:  The Rise of Cartography in the Long 19^th Century” is the title of a talk by University of Delaware scholar Martin Brückner, scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 9.

Free and open to the public, the lecture begins at 7 p.m. in Emerson Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Brückner will describe the rise of wall maps, in particular map giants measuring five by six feet and more, in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. Drawing on an archive consisting of nearly 500 such maps, he will use representative maps from an "industrial" map era—by individual mapmakers, such as Samuel A. Mitchell, Jacob Monk, and teams such as Timothy Ensign & B. W. Thayer—putting special emphasis on map design, materiality, and intertextuality. Building on an environmental approach informed by the visual arts, material culture, and cartographic history, Brückner will explore how maps provided men and women, ranging from presidents to school girls, with a formidable interactive medium for imagining life in America.

A professor of English and American literature who is also affiliated with Delaware’s Center for Material Culture Studies, Brückner wrote The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (UNCP, 2006), which received the 2006-2007 Louis Gottschalk Prize. He is co-editor, with Hsuan L. Hsu, of American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900 (UDP, 2007) and has also published essays in the journals American Quarterly, English Literary History, American Literary History and in numerous essay collections. Brückner received the Francis Alison Younger Scholar Award (2002) and has held grants and post-doctoral fellowships from various institutions, including the Andrew W. Mellon foundation (Omohundro Institute, 2001-2002) and the NEH (Winterthur Museum, Spring 2009). His current research examines the social life of maps in early American culture. He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early American literature, history of books and reading, the environmental imagination, cultural studies, and literary theory.

The Oct. 9 event is co-sponsored by Skidmore’s Department of History and the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative.  Said Tillman Nechtman, chair of the History Department, “This lecture marks an exciting expansion of work that our department has been doing in visual history, public history, and documentary studies.”