Canada before Confederation: Maps at the Exhibition

Chet Van Duzer is an NEH-Mellon Fellow at the Library of Congress and a board member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester, which brings multispectral imaging to cultural institutions around the world. He is a researcher and writer who has published extensively on medieval and early modern maps in journals such as Imago Mundi, Terrae Incognitae, Word & Image, and Viator. He is the author of Johann Schöner’s Globe of 1515: Transcription and Study, the first detailed analysis of one of the earliest surviving terrestrial globes that includes the New World; and (with John Hessler) Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps. His book Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps was published in 2013 by the British Library, and is now available in German and Russian editions, with a Chinese edition on the way. In 2014 the Library of Congress published a study of Christopher Columbus’s Book of Privileges which he co-authored with John Hessler and Daniel De Simone. His book The World for a King: Pierre Desceliers’ Map of 1550 was published at the end of 2015 by the British Library, and in 2016 Brill published a book he co-authored with Ilya Dines, Apocalyptic Cartography: Thematic Maps and the End of the World in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript. His current project is a study of the annotations in a heavily annotated copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography.

Lauren Beck is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Mount Allison University, Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario, and Editor of Terrae Incognitae, the international journal devoted to the history of discovery and exploration. Her research specializations include early modern visual culture of the Spanish world, the Iberian Atlantic, and in particular book illustration and historical cartography. She is the author of Transforming the Enemy in Spanish Culture: The Conquest through the Lens of Textual and Visual Multiplicity (2013) and her recent articles have appeared in Image & Narrative and Journal of North African Studies. With Christina Ionescu, she co-curated the exhibition Mapping North America: Narratives of Discovery.