News & Events

AGSL Lectures

Maps & America: The Arthur Holzheimer Lecture Series

The AGSL hosts a number of lecture series, events, and exhibits throughout the year. To receive email updates about any of our lectures, send an email to agsl@uwm.edu with the subject: lectures & exhibits updates.

  • April 30, 2026 – Maps & America: The Arthur Holzheimer Lecture Series
  • The Maps & America: The Arthur Holzheimer Lecture Series will continue with speaker Dr. Julio Pedrassoli, Associate Professor at University of São Paulo (USP), Adjunct Professor – Western Michigan University (WMU), & MapBiomas Urban Area Mapping Team Coordinator.

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    About the speaker:
    Julio Pedrassoli is a remote sensing scientist and geographer, holding a PhD in Human Geography from the University of São Paulo (USP). His research focuses on mapping urban expansion and housing–poverty dynamics in the Global South. He is an Associate Professor at USP and Adjunct Professor at Western Michigan University (WMU). In 2025, he was selected for the NASA Lifelines – Ready for Impact program, proposing a tropical-scale urban risk mapping system. A former Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, he develops advanced methods for mapping informal settlements. He serves on the Steering Committee of the IGU Urban Commission, is part of the coordination of the Network Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South (N-AERUS) and leads urban mapping within the MapBiomas initiative.

    About the lecture:
    Dr. Pedrassoli will lecture about his work with MapBiomas, where he is the urban mapping specialist. MapBiomas is a Brazilian-founded initiative that uses cloud computing, machine learning, and decades of satellite imagery to produce large‑scale, time‑series environmental maps. Dr. Pedrassoli will also analyze the societal impacts of organizing mapping through a broad collaborative network of academics, NGOs, tech companies, and civil society. Through the lens of counter-cartography, the lecture examines how such an arrangement shapes data transparency, methodological openness, and the public circulation of territorial information, particularly in deforestation, land-use change, climate governance, and land conflicts. The Brazilian experience is finally situated as a reference model that has been replicated across South America and the tropical world as a source of institutional and methodological innovation in cartographic practice. 

    Held in the spring of each year in the AGSL on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, the Maps & America Lecture Series was inaugurated by the noted cartographic historian, Brian Harley, in 1990. Since its inception, the lecture series has been generously sponsored by Arthur and Janet Holzheimer of the Chicago area. Over the years, the series has featured many of the leading figures in the field of map history and provided a multifaceted survey of this rapidly developing field.
  • If you would like to help support the AGSL’s preservation efforts, you can donate here. Just choose “other funds” under designations and search or scroll to find the AGSL.

Academic Adventurers Series

  • Academic Adventurers Series
    • Our 2025-2026 Academic Adventurer series has concluded. Thank you so much to our attendees! The series will return in the fall.
    • If you would like to help support the AGSL’s preservation efforts, you can donate here. Just choose “other funds” under designations and search or scroll to find the AGSL.

UWM Department of Geography Lectures

Colloquy

Each academic year the AGSL hosts the UWM Geography Department’s colloquium from 3:00-4:00pm (fall) or 2:30-3:30 (spring) on Friday afternoons. For more information see the Department of Geography’s calendar of events.

Harold and Florence Mayer Lecture Series

This lecture series is sponsored by the Department of Geography and held in the AGSL in the fall and spring. It is made possible by an endowment from Harold and Florence Mayer. Harold Mayer (1916 – 1994) was a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and one of the leading scholars in the field of urban geography in the twentieth century. He specialized in Urban and Transport Geography of North America with a focus on New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, and British Columbia. For more information see the Department of Geography’s web site.