3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

In the early modern world, people traveled further and more routinely than ever before. This course looks at the tools used to facilitate such endeavors—from maps to navigational charts, from atlases to astrolabes. However, beyond mere logistical instruments for imperial expansion, colonial settlement, and commercial trade, these objects and pictures structured new ways of thinking about and imagining the world and its spaces. An armchair traveler in Amsterdam could envision a journey to and travel within a place like modern-day Indonesia; a Spaniard living in the highlands of present-day Bolivia could imagine, in period terms, “all the cities of the universe and more.” This course attends to excavating the representational economies forged from the mass-production and wide circulation of navigational objects and pictorialized territories. Though the focus will be on the early modern period, we will read broadly and engage a wide range of theories; and students are encouraged to use the tools we develop in class to research representation from any time and place.