2013 10/16 Steven Seegel
STEVEN SEEGEL
Speaking in Maps: Toward a Spatial Prosopography of East Central Europe's Modern Geographers
Steven Seegel is Associate Professor of History, University of Northern Colorado, the author of books on the history of modern East European geography, geopolitics, and critical cartography: Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2011); Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). His current project, Map Wars, is a microstudy of the entangled modern lives and transnational careers of six geographers across East Central Europe, from the 1870s to the 1950s.
Graduate student inquirer Alison Orton, UIC
Summary
“A new instrument was discovered—the map language. A map was as good as a brilliant poster, and just being a map made it respectable, authentic. A perverted map was a life-belt to many a foundering argument,” thus wrote the U.S. geographer Isaiah Bowman in 1921. Bowman (1878-1950), a naturalized American citizen of 1899 born in Ontario in 1878, was recalling his experiences at the Paris Conference in 1919. As the influential director of the American Geographical Society since 1915, he was appointed Chief Territorial Specialist of the U.S. Committee to Negotiate Peace in 1918. He was placed in charge of coordinating all geographical data for the post-World War I remapping of a democratic East Central Europe. Bowman served on the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations and the board of Foreign Affairs since 1921, was the head of the International Geographers’ Union from 1928 to 1934, became the sixth president of Johns Hopkins in 1935, and later had the ear of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Taking Bowman’s insight to heart, this presentation previews the methodology of my current project, Map Wars. It is a microstudy of modern European and U.S. history, looking at constructions of subjecthood from the global and postcolonial vantages of uncertain frontiers. Using geographers’ personal diaries and letters, I look at political geography, forms of transnational cultural transfer, and visual modes of borrowing and mimesis. The project examines Bowman together with the entangled lives and deaths of five geographers in East Central Europe – Albrecht Penck (1858-1945) of Germany, Eugeniusz Romer (1871-1954) of Poland, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi (1877-1937) of Ukraine, Count Pál Teleki (1879-1941) of Hungary, and Arkadz Smolich (1891-1938) of Belarus. I pay careful attention to the histories of imperialism and nationalism, since these geographers assimilated to 20th-century states after emerging from 19th-century Europe’s multiethnic dynastic empires. Many became lifelong international friends, or as one-time friends turned after World War I into avowed geopolitical rivals.
For the SEE NEXT seminar, I will introduce a new historical approach of spatial prosopography, which combines recent scholarship on feminist human geography, transnational histoire croisée, mental maps, and the new imperial history. Primarily, this is a form of poststructuralist collective biography, in interwoven synchronic form in East Central Europe from the 1870s to the 1950s. Special attention is devoted to categories of space and place as modes of belonging, the transnational uses and abuses of nationality discourse, and the layered meanings of maps. This symbolic bundling of meaning was inherent to the fragmented loyalties, as well as the fateful borderland choices, in the transnational lives of geographers who became bourgeois professionals and served, in a vulnerable way, the geopolitical ambitions of 20th-century states and societies.