Date: Thursday, February 20th, 2025
Location: The Newberry Library | 60 West Walton St | Chicago IL | Google Maps
Time: 5:30 pm CT (Social Time)
6:00 pm CT (Presentation)
Title: Legal Maps & Maritime Space: The case of John Selden’s Mare clausum
Speaker: Hayley Cotter
Abstract: This talk considers maps as legible legal arguments. It investigates the eight engraved maps associated with the four editions of English jurist John Selden’s Mare clausum printed in 1635 and 1636, a treatise which defended the principle of closed seas. These cartographic supplements that were inserted into the book have been almost uniformly overlooked by legal historians. However, this talk demonstrates how these maps visually posit the possibility of maritime dominion. It reveals how these seemingly ornamental inserts, produced in London, Leiden, and Amsterdam, illustrate not only the legal arguments of Selden’s text, but also the national interests of the individual map makers, and shows how the maps evolved across editions. Its analysis will consider the cartographic framing of maritime space and the incorporation of decorative elements to support juristic and political principles.
Bio: Hayley Cotter is a scholar of early modern literature and culture. Specifically, her work investigates the legal, literary, material, and cultural manifestations of maritime law in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her research has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Spenser Studies, and the Journal of Early Modern Studies. Hayley currently holds the Monticello College Foundation Fellowship for Women and the Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Newberry Library. She was the 2023-2024 Kemble Fellow in Maritime History at the Huntington Library and has also received fellowships from the Herzog August Bibliothek and the Renaissance Society of America.
Date: Thursday, March 20th, 2025
Location: The Newberry Library | 60 West Walton St | Chicago IL | Google Maps
Time: 5:30 pm CT (Social Time)
6:00 pm CT (Presentation)
Title: Touring “Our USA”: Seeing U.S. Empire through the Pictorial Maps of Ruth Taylor White
Speaker: Emily Lyon
Abstract: Although widespread today, guidebooks, travel pamphlets, and maps for tourism have their origins in earlier periods, often during times when means of travel and printing technologies transformed. One of these moments came at the beginning of the twentieth century, when pictorial mapping—a distinct genre of cartography that favored narrative, illustrated styles and typically included stories about history and culture—took off alongside a booming tourism industry. Although often overlooked in histories of the United States, American women were able to participate in this type of mapping in more varied ways than in previous genres. This talk will examine the pictorial maps of one woman, Ruth Taylor White, analyzing how her cartographic and artistic practice made claims about what counted as part of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and encouraged white American women to experience different sites of U.S. empire as tourists.
Speaker Bio: Emily Lyon is a public historian committed to bringing her research and expertise to diverse audiences, and she currently works as a postdoctoral fellow in public history at the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for Cartography. She is researching and writing, assisting with public programming, creating pedagogical material, and producing digital content for the Center’s many projects. She is a historian of visual culture and U.S. empire, and she received her PhD from Northwestern University in 2024. Her dissertation examined how white women, working as photographers, cartographers, travel writers, and monument makers, produced visual commodities would encourage Americans, and especially white women, to experience sites of empire as tourists and to consume U.S. imperial culture.
Date: Thursday, April 17th, 2024
Location: The Newberry Library | 60 West Walton St | Chicago IL | Google Maps
Time: 5:30 pm CT (Social Time)
6:00 pm CT (Presentation)
Title: Finding Food: How We Map and Talk About Food Access in Chicago and Beyond
Speaker: Daniel Block
Speaker Bio: Daniel Block is a professor of geography at Chicago State University and the coordinator of the Fred Blum Neighborhood Assistance Center, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University and the School of Urban Planning at UIC. He has completed many food access studies, including the Northeastern Illinois Community Food Security Assessment, a large-scale food access study of the six-county Chicago metro area. He is a past president of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society. In 2018, he was named a fellow of the American Association of Geographers and is the co-author of Chicago: A Food Biography, a history of Chicago told through its food system, published by Rowman and Littlefield.
Date: Thursday, May 15th, 2025
Location: The Newberry Library | 60 West Walton St | Chicago IL | Google Maps
Time: 5:30 pm CT (Social Time)
6:00 pm CT (Presentation)
Title: Maps, Biogeography, and Species Extinction
Speaker: Richard Condit