A recent historiographical shift has opened up the study of mapping, particularly in its imperial functions, not only as an antiquarian fascination but now also as a source of political, social, and intellectual history. This graduate course will examine maps as sites of the construction of identities, of the exercising of power and of performances of violence.

We will look at mapping as an encounter, and as an intrinsically ideological and imaginative process. Each week will focus on a specific set of maps, reading the maps themselves as historical texts and looking at the constructions of space, power, identity, and conflict they engendered. Although taking a global perspective, we will look at four case studies from North America, Africa, India and South East Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, through which we will explore themes of imperialism, nationalism, expressions of sovereignty, territoriality, cartographic literacy, non-cartographic mapping practices, gender and space, counter-mapping, conceptions of self, and wider issues related to geographic imaginations.