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.
