For more information, please visit http://www.bnu.fr/action-culturel/agenda/colloque-international-faire-connaitre-les-mondes-en-decouverte.

For more information, please visit http://www.bnu.fr/action-culturel/agenda/colloque-international-faire-connaitre-les-mondes-en-decouverte.

Speaker:  Laura Dassow Walls

Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent book is Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Location:  Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library

Event Information:  Please join us for a special presentation at the Newberry Library to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth. In conjunction with the Chicago Sister Cities International program, this meeting will feature a keynote presentation by Dr. Laura Walls, as well as a sneak peek of the new documentary on von Humboldt, “La mirada del explorador.”

Laura Dassow Walls first encountered Alexander von Humboldt when a professor told her no one could understand Darwin without reading Humboldt. She was mesmerized by the opening sentences of Views of Nature, and ever since she’s never been far from Humboldt’s spell; Prof. Walls’s books include Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, and she co-edited the first modern translation of Humboldt’s Views of Nature. Her presentation will track Humboldt to the Americas and trace how the paradoxes of place left him devising new ways for maps to beckon a new world into being.

The Chicago Map Society typically meets at The Newberry on the third Thursday of every month during the academic year (September through May). Meetings start at 5:30 p.m. with a social half-hour, followed by an hour presentation on a cartographic subject of interest to our membership. Our meetings are open to the public, but to help defray expenses, non-members are asked for a small donation at the door.

Speaker:  Dr. James A. Welu, Director Director Emeritus, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA

For more information, please visit http://www.maphistory.info/warburgprog.html.

Speaker:  John Huth will expand upon his book "The Lost Art of Finding Our Way"

Location:  Avenues HQ, 17th Floor Boardroom, 11 East 26th Street (between  
Madison and Fifth Avenues), New York, NY 10011. Bring Photo ID for entry.  Please RSVP to MapSocietyNY@gmail.com

Event Information:  Huth will examine the post-smartphone world with an eye to the losses we
have incurred in exchange for boundless information at our fingertips. My
book is a guide to the “primitive” (and yet, incredibly sophisticated)
techniques by which our forebears charted, measured, predicted, and
navigated their place in space.

Speaker:  Chris Lane (Rocky Mountain Map Society Board Member) 

Event Information:  Lane will be giving his talk The First Comprehensive Survey of Colorado: Ferdinand V. Hayden, 1869-1876 at the of the Oregon-California Trails Association, Colorado-Cherokee Trail Chapter meeting.

Speaker:   Nick Kanas, M.D. (Washington Map Society)

Nick Kanas, M.D., is a Professor Emeritus (Psychiatry) at the University of California, San Francisco, and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He has conducted NASA-funded research, has been an amateur astronomer for nearly 60 years, and has collected antiquarian celestial maps, books, and prints for over 35 years. He has given a number of talks on celestial cartography to amateur and professional groups, and he has written two books on the subject: Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography, now in its 3rd edition, and Solar System Maps: From Antiquity to the Space Age.    

Event Information:  People have observed the night sky since antiquity. The ancient Greeks placed the stars in a coordinate system that was based on celestial latitude and longitude, but they also organized them in a group of constellations that were viewed as allegorical representations of classical Greek heroes, heroines, and monsters. These images formed the backbone of constellation maps that appeared in stunningly beautiful star atlases of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Dr. Kanas will discuss this history of star mapping using striking images from antiquarian sources.    

Will be held at the Westchester Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

For more information, visit https://californiamapsociety.org/event-3503072.

Speaker:   Chet Van Duzer 

Please RSVP to ctmapsociety@gmail.com.