Convenors: Catherine Gibson (Tartu), Martin Jeske (Berlin), Anton Kotenko (Düsseldorf)

This interdisciplinary workshop will bring together anthropologists, art scholars, geographers, surveyors, historians, and political scientists to critically examine the potential of history of cartography of the Romanov Empire to illuminate understudied aspects of the empire’s past.

By breaking the conventional boundaries of history and studying various types of thematic maps as ways to organise and shape knowledge, from hydrology to migration, the workshop aims to rethink the empire in an unconventional light – as a number of different layers, created by professional cartographers and amateur mapmakers.

The scholarly objectives of the workshop are twofold. First, it aims to conceptually and methodologically advance the field of spatial history of the Romanov Empire through a focus on maps and mapmaking practices. Second, it will contextualise these maps in larger fields of scholarly inquiry that speak to more general histories of empires, science, cartography, territorialisation, environment, nationalism, urbanisation, and industrialisation of the long nineteenth century world.