The American Geographical Society Library named three national scholars as AGSL Research Fellows for 2026. Each will receive a stipend to travel to Milwaukee and conduct research at the AGSL.
Cy Abbott, University of Oregon PhD candidate in geography, will examine the influence of American geographers and cartographers on drawing borders in Central Asia and the ‘Turkic world’ during the first quarter of the 20th century using the AGSL’s collection of maps loaned by the American Geographical Society to the Peace Conference at Versailles, 1918-1919. Abbott will also use the AGSL map collection to study Central Asia and Turkey, specifically maps mentioned in the “New Maps” or “Map Notices” section of various Geographical Review volumes.
Jon Jablonski, University of California, Santa Barbara Library DREAM Lab director, will consider how urban historic cartography reflects the dramatic political and economic transformations of late 20th-century China. To investigate these transformations, Jablonski will examine the AGSL’s contemporary city maps of China, as well as its collections of US Army Map Service maps of 20th-century China. Jablonski’s fellowship also marks a return to his alma mater, where he served as a library services assistant during his undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Caroline West, Princeton University PhD candidate in history, will investigate the historically incoherent mapping of the Appalachian region and explore how 20th-century public and private actors have grappled with the question of the region’s identity, or avoided it altogether. Given the project’s focus on the flexibility of the region in terms of geographic space, West will pull from a variety of AGSL materials, including reports by the Ozarks Regional Commission, as well as pamphlets highlighting the southern highlands, the Appalachian Mountains/Trail, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. West will also dig into the monographs, articles, data collections, and correspondence of American cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky, in addition to the unpublished dissertation of Scottish geographer Neil Smith, and the scrapbooks of Flora Carlos, documenting her travels throughout the American South in the 1930s.
Entirely funded by generous donors, the AGSL Research Fellowship program was created to give scholars from around the world an opportunity to pursue their work in proximity to AGSL’s distinguished collection of primary sources, which include over 635,000 maps of all types covering the world at a wide range of scales; an extensive photographic collection of more than 900,000 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.