Mapping Nature Across the Americas

FAIN: EH-50378-13

Newberry Library (Chicago, IL 60610-3305)
James R. Akerman (Project Director: March 2013 to April 2015)

A five-week institute for twenty college and university faculty to explore connections between mapping and environmental knowledge in the Americas from the contact period to the twenty-first century.

The Newberry Library's Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography seeks NEH support for a five-week summer institute for college and university faculty 2014 that traces the interplay between mapping and environmental knowledge across the Americas from the transatlantic encounter into the twenty-first century. The institute, Mapping Nature across the Americas, led by James Akerman and Kathleen Brosnan, will examine in a Pan-American context the complicated, contradictory, and contested ways in which humans mapped and conceived their place in nature through history. The institute will be distinctive in its use of maps as the core texts for this intellectual exploration, and for the ways it will consider how mapping has both captured and transformed human conceptions of nature over time. It will feature six guest faculty members, specialists in the history of cartography, environmental history, geography, US history, and Latin American history.