2025 Seminar Description

Teaching with and through Maps

Ayesha Ramachandran, Professor of Comparative Literature

This course begins with the premise that maps both create narratives about space and influence how we experience and shape our worlds. As historical objects, maps offer stories about how we imagine and organize ourselves in psychological, spiritual, social and political terms; but the map has also become a charged concept in contemporary science and social theory codifying ideas and expectations about space, place, orientation and itinerary. This interdisciplinary seminar will offer a brief history of mapping as well as strategies to incorporate map-making and cartographic thinking into the K-12 classroom. We will focus on the map as emerging through art and science from the "cartographic revolution" of the sixteenth century to the grand digital-spatial dream of Google Earth, with some attention to non-Western mapping styles and technologies. Tools will include working with maps in literary texts, mapping the self/community, measuring and mapping defined spaces/terrains, learning to read survey/contour maps, and interpreting visual data presented in map form. Field trips would include the Beinecke library and the Peabody museum.