THURSDAY 11 April 2024
Location: Zoom, 7:00 PM ET/6:00 PM CT/ 5:00 PM MT/4:00 PM PT
(Sponsored in partnership with California, Chicago, New York, Philip Lee Phillips, Rocky Mountain, and Texas Map Societies)
Title: Svalbard, Paradise and Beyond: The Arctic Islands on Medieval and Early Modern Maps
Speaker: Leonid S. Chekin, Conference Interpreter for the World Bank Group and Russian Space: Concepts, Practices, Representations working group member at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Summary: For much of the Middle Ages, the Arctic was inaccessible to most travelers. Cartographers described the circumpolar regions to discuss the story of humanity’s salvation or to make connections between the celestial sphere and the globe. In both contexts, theorizations of Arctic islands may have included myths and discoveries such as “Spitsbergen” or “paradise.” Attempts to identify these myths and discoveries on a modern map often result in false positive identifications. I will suggest why debunking these identifications is more difficult and time-consuming than proposing a few new (and equally unreliable) ones.
Bio: Chekin is a Northern Virginia based contract conference interpreter for the Word Bank Group. As a member of the Russian Space: Concepts, Practices, Representations working group at the Arctic University of Norway since 2015, he conducts research on the history of translation, interpreting, and linguistics, the history of cartography, and Svalbard Studies. He graduated from the Department of Philology of Moscow University, received a Doctor of Geographical Sciences degree from the Russian Academy of Sciences, and taught at Colgate University and the University of Pennsylvania. His awards include the Society for the Humanities Postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship at the University of Cologne, and a scholarship from the Danish Arts Council.
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When: Apr 11, 2024 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
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