View CEMS ANU Inaugural Seminar, June 2021

View CEMS ANU Inaugural Seminar, June 2021

by Centre for Early Modern Studies

The CEMS Seminar One recording is now available on our Youtube Channel. Many thanks to the seventy participants who joined us through the Zoom platform for our Inaugural Seminar when Professor Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks spoke about her latest book, What Is Early Modern History?, which was published in March in the Polity What Is History? series. The work offers a concise guide to historical research from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, within and beyond Europe, including subfields and approaches to the period. Professor Wiesner-Hanks generously shared how the book was conceptualized and written, and the ways this was challenged and changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The seminar was be followed by a Q&A and discussion.

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the long-time senior editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal, and the editor-in-chief of the seven-volume Cambridge World History (2015). She is the author or editor of 30 books and more than 100 articles or book chapters, some of which have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean. Her publications are widely used in teaching around the world, from middle school through graduate school. She is currently editing, with Mathew Kuefler, the four-volume Cambridge World History of Sexualities.

The seminar recording is now available for you to view online:

CEMS ANU Inaugural Seminar Recording

 

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Historian of cartography Chet Van Duzer will host this CEMS workshop on studying early modern maps slowly.

When: Tuesday 14 October, 2025

Where: ANU Campus (location TBA)

Regstration: Registrations open soon

Abstract

Maps are incredibly rich documents that only reveal some of their secrets after slow and deliberate study, and it is precisely this aspect of maps that we will explore in this two-hour workshop. Chet Van Duzer will analyze several early modern maps and provide examples of important characteristics of them that can only be appreciated and understood through slow looking. He will also supply advice on how to study maps slowly, and workshop participants will consult historic maps to begin to practice looking slowly at them, with plenty of time for examining the maps together and asking questions. The goal of the workshop is that participants will gain experience and tools for engaging more fully with maps in the future.

About the Speaker

Chet Van Duzer is a historian of cartography and a board member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester, which brings multispectral imaging (a technology for recovering information from damaged manuscripts) to cultural institutions around the world. He has published extensively on medieval and Renaissance maps; his recent books include Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence, published by Springer in 2019, and Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta marina of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends, published by Springer in 2020. His book Frames that Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps was published by Brill in Open Access in 2023. His current projects are books about self-portraits by cartographers that appear on maps and the historical cartography of the Indian Ocean.