The American Geographical Society Library has awarded research fellowships to three international scholars for 2024. All three are exploring a “view from the outside“ — as one of the fellows, Jitka Močičková, characterizes her research topic — during their time in AGSL.
Jitka Močičková is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Modern Transnational and Intellectual History at the Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), Prague, and curator of the Institute’s map collection. For her project, “Mapping the (Epi)Centre: American Cartographic Reflections on the Transformation of Central Europe in the First Half of the 20th Century,“ Močičková will look at the cartographical materials prepared by the American Geographical Society for the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, contemporary monographs and scholarly journals, and maps of Central European provenance in the AGSL collection.
Maxwell Woods, assistant professor of liberal arts at L’Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Viña del Mar, Chile, will explore the cultural geography of Bolivia found in the travel writing of the Irish female author, Ena Dargan. Focusing on Dargan’s book, Road to Cuzco: A Journey from Argentina to Peru (1950), Woods will analyze how the white colonial geographic imagination is affected by nationality and gender. At AGSL Woods will study Dargan’s rare volume in close proximity to other travel narratives through Indigenous Latin America at the same time as Dargan’s and pamphlets from mid-twentieth-century European cartographers and geographers detailing the geography of Bolivia.
Victoria Sánchez Mellado, Ph.D., Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla, Spain, proposes to examine 19th and 20th century travel books about Spain written by non-Spanish authors. From the AGSL’s vast collection of travel-related materials, she has prioritized 30 books, published between 1847 and 1955, by writers from the United Kingdom, US, Italy, France, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Ireland, Uruguay, and Argentina, that she will study alongside historical maps. Her goal is to analyze the correlation of the prominence of certain places of interest, the ways those places and their monuments are mapped, and their inclusion in the travel narratives.
Entirely funded by generous donors, the fellowship program gives scholars from around the world an opportunity to pursue their work in proximity to AGSL’s distinguished collection of primary sources, which includes over 520,000 maps of all types covering the world at a wide range of scales; an extensive photographic collection of more than 800,000 images in a variety of formats; and a number of important archives in the field of geography. The library also owns over 320,000 volumes of atlases, books, and periodicals related to geography and cartography.