JANUARY 16, 2011: KAREN WIGEN, Ph.D.

This program was not video recorded

The challenge of mapping global water-bodies – vast, vague, slippery spaces of interaction – has much in common with the conceptual challenge of tackling world history. This talk explores four fundamentally different models that were used between 1450 and 1950 to map the world’s oceans, finding in each maritime map a metaphor for one important way that historians today are writing the history of globalization.

Kären Wigen is Professor of History and Director of the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University, where she teachescourses on early Japan and the history of cartography. Co-author with her husband, Martin Lewis, of The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Meta-Geography (1997), she recently edited a collection of essays on the theme of Seascapes: Maritimaritime mapsme Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges (2007). Her latest book is A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912, published earlier this year by the University of California Press.