H-HistGeog: New posted content
Approaching Deadline: CFP Mapping the Gulf of Mexico [Announcement]
TMS Spring Meeting 2026
Mapping the Gulf of Mexico
April 10-11, Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas
The Texas Map Society invites paper proposals for its Spring Meeting dedicated to the spatial history, science, and visualization of the Gulf of Mexico. We seek to bring together map collectors, historians of cartography, marine scientists, geographers, archivists, digital humanities scholars, and others to explore the Gulf as a contested and evolving space.
From early colonial maritime charts to high-resolution bathymetric modeling, the mapping of the Gulf of Mexico has been central to geopolitical strategy, economic extractions, and environmental preservation. With this conference we aim to examine how the Gulf of Mexico has been defined by the tools used to measure it and the narratives built upon its waters.
We welcome paper proposals on, but not limited to, the role of maps in Spanish, French, and British colonial claims, historical and modern methods of mapping the Gulf floor and the Continental Shelf, environmental humanities, Indigenous geographies and the recovering of non-Western spatial knowledge and coastal navigation traditions, borders and jurisdictions, and digital humanities projects particularly as they relate to the Texas coast and/or its islands.
Submission Requirements
We welcome proposals for individual 20 minutes papers or pre-constituted panels.
- Individual Abstracts: 250–300 words.
- Panel Proposals: A 150-word session description plus short abstracts for each presenter.
- Short Biography: A 100-word biography, can include relevant publications or projects.
Deadlines
- Proposals Due: March 10
- Acceptance Notification: March 15
Contact & Submissions
Please submit all materials in a single PDF directly to TMS VP Lydia Towns at Lydia...@sfasu.edu
Lydia Towns
Upcoming Deadline: USHMM Faculty Seminar: Resistance to the Holocaust in Germany, Austria, and Beyond (Deadline March 15, 2026) [Announcement]
DC
United States
The 2026 Curt C. and Else Silberman Faculty Seminar explores resistance acts during the Holocaust with a focus on protest, hiding, and rescue. Together, we will examine the different forms of Jews’ resistance to Nazi antisemitic policies, as well as assistance that Jews and non-Jews (or “mixed” categories) provided to Jews, who found hiding places, lived under false identities, and escaped the Nazis during the Holocaust. In addition to discussing individual acts of resistance, we will investigate the ways in which Jewish and non-Jewish men and women were associated with or participated in resistance groups and networks. With the goal of teaching this content, we will consider why Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is still often perceived as a rare occurrence, and how gender stereotypes led to a restricted or distorted view of Jewish and non-Jewish resistance. We will also examine the following topics:
- varieties of Jewish resistance, including hiding, passing, and escaping, etc.
- comparative research of rescue across Europe during the Holocaust
- the contexts and methods of Jews' and non-Jews' resistance
- the consequences and moral implications of rescue actions
- Jewish and non-Jewish forms of cooperation
- the politics of commemorating resisters and rescuers, etc.
The 2026 Silberman Seminar helps faculty, instructors, and advanced PhD students who are currently teaching or preparing to teach courses that focus on or have a curricular component related to the Holocaust. Applications are welcome from instructors across academic disciplines, including but not limited to Anthropology, Archeology, Art, Disability Studies, Gender Studies, German Studies, History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Jewish Studies, Human Rights, Migration Studies, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Political Science and International Relations, Psychology, Refugee Studies, Sociology, and Trauma and Memory Studies. The seminar aims to deepen, broaden, and enrich how we teach the Holocaust by drawing on a range of perspectives and disciplinary approaches to address different forms of Jews’ resistance to the Holocaust.
The deadline for applications is Sunday, March 15, 2026. This seminar will take place June 1–10, 2026 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Seminar applicants must be teaching or anticipate teaching relevant courses at accredited institutions in North America. The full CfA and the application form are available here on the USHMM here: https://www.ushmm.org/research/opportunities-for-academics/faculty-seminars/silberman/2026-curt-c-and-else-silberman-faculty-seminar
Please contact Campus Outreach Programs (campusoutre...@ushmm.org) with any questions.
Apply before 5/18: $1,200 grants for early career digital publications from Leventhal Center [Announcement]
MA
United States
Now through Monday, May 18 at 5pm ET, the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library welcomes applications to our Small Grants Fund for Early Career Digital Publications for the 2026-2027 academic year.
The grant consists of a stipend of $1,200 to support research and development time, together with institutional research and technical support from LMEC staff through the stages of the digital publication process. Projects may be conducted by scholars working both inside and outside of the academy on all topics related to geography, maps, history, and the humanistic spatial social sciences, either individually or in a group (though the stipend amount is fixed regardless of the number of scholars involved in the project). The primary author of the publication should be an early career scholar.
- Read more about eligibility and how to apply on our website: https://www.leventhalmap.org/research/digital-publication-small-grants/
- Explore the archive of digital publications previously supported by this program: https://www.leventhalmap.org/research/digital-publications-archive/
Don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions. Please submit your application by Monday 5/18 at 5pm ET.
Ian Spangler, Associate Curator of Digital & Participatory Geography, Leventhal Map & Education Center
Transfers CFP: "(Contested) Motorways" [Announcement]
CALL FOR PAPERS: “(Contested) Motorways”
For a SPECIAL ISSUE to be published in Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies
Motorways1 are neither inherently popular nor a “natural” outcome of motorization (Avila 2014; Kunze 2022; Magalhães 2024). Instead, road building projects have always faced criticism, even if much of the contestation remains marginalized (North 1998, McNeish 1999). The construction of motorways worldwide is the result of sharp transnational political wills and the work of strong lobbies promoting motorization. Motorways shape collective and individual imaginaries of both landscapes and mobilities, while functioning as political and economic instruments of power (Anand, Gupta & Appel 2018; Coutard 2024). They lie at the center of socioecological controversies, reflecting divergent visions of society (Seiler 2009) – some defending progress embodied by the infrastructure, others highlighting its negative externalities. Many scholars depict motorways as scars on urban and rural landscapes, emblematic of disruption and inequality (Avila 2014; Lewis 1997), and even as “an everyday form of devastation” (Williams 2025, ix). Recent scholarly work further challenges their status as inevitable infrastructures of modernity and progress, framing them instead as terrains of political struggle and contestation – criticized for their high financial and socioecological costs, their reinforcement of motorization, and their incompatibility with sustainability and climate goals (Magalhães 2024; Williams 2025).
The first motorway projects are almost as old as the automobile itself. However, the idea of a road network exclusively for motorized traffic struggled to gain acceptance before World War II, when only a very small minority of people owned cars. The 1950’s marked a key moment in the development of motorways and the global spread of motorization (Lewis 1997; Merriman 2007). While a common drive to construct motorways spanned Europe, America, and Oceania, the rationales and methods varied significantly across contexts. Some countries prioritized extensive intercity networks, others focused on ring roads to divert traffic from urban cores. These projects were shaped by diverse forces—ranging from lobbying by tourism, automotive, and oil industries to militarized agendas intertwined with economic arguments—revealing that the grounds for motorway building were far from uniform. The motorway embodies the social and economic aim of unimpeded circulation, speed and connectivity, openness, political liberalism and economic prosperity (Harvey & Knox, 2016; Kuligowsky 2019). Nowadays, motorway networks remain considered as material and symbolic markers of development, including in the Global South. Therefore, motorway projects endure, whether new constructions, expansions, or widenings. States continue to build and complete networks revealing socio-technical barriers that seem impossible to overcome (Mattioli et al., 2020; Jones and McCreary 2022). Despite the 2015 Paris Agreement and the urgent need to reduce worldwide CO2 emissions, large road infrastructures emerge as sites of complex struggles involving competing visions between political authorities, engineers, developers, commuters, tourists, local residents and ecologists. Motorway development has occurred at the cost of dispossession, an aggravation of car dependency and environmental disasters. Debates on motorway projects expose tensions between planning objectives and residents lived realities (Seiler 2009; Kuligowsky 2019; Senior et al. 2024). Criticism of the motorway concept emerged as early as the first experiments in the interwar period and the 1950’s (Merriman 2017; Kunze 2022). Contestations of urban motorways in Western countries, spurred by the rise of political ecology in the 1960’s and 1970’s, drove sociotechnical changes that introduced pollution-mitigation technologies such as noise barriers, tunnels, and trenches. Yet, while these measures encouraged more participatory policies and planning, they largely served to increase public acceptability and deflect criticism rather than to limit further motorway expansion. Nowadays, the contestation of large road infrastructure remains important, at least in contexts where the voices of the opponents can be heard. Contestation over motorways reflects broader debates about modernity, progress, mobility, sustainability, and urbanity. Recent examples include the A69 motorway in Southwestern France, which sparked strong environmental, political, and legal disputes, and Switzerland’s 2024 referendum that unexpectedly resulted in the rejection of six motorway expansion projects after intense national discussions on the future of mobility. These cases illustrate how opposition extends beyond halting new construction to include initiatives for motorway removal or repurposing, aligning with wider goals of sustainable urban development and liveable cities.
The special issue will gather empirical articles broadly engaging with the promotion, support and refusal of motorway projects either in the past and in the present days. Contributions may also thematize the motorway as a physical place of contestation or activism. Conceptually, the articles can engage with different disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds including work on the system of automobility, mobility justice and social movement theory.
Research perspectives could include (but are not limited to):
PROMOTING AND DEFENDING MOTORWAYS: Advocates of motorways have advanced a powerful, optimistic narrative emphasizing their promises—framed around the ideas of safety, reduced congestion, socioeconomic progress, speed, efficiency and enhanced regional accessibility—while simultaneously deploying diverse strategies to deflect and manage criticism. How can we explain the emergence of the concept of motorways as exclusive spaces for motorized transport, sidelining other modes? How is this idea promoted, and through which arguments and political strategies?
OPPOSING MOTORWAY PROJECTS: In what contexts are motorways contested, and through which arguments? Resistance emerges across civil society and politics—from left-wing groups to the far right, from public transport advocates to intellectual circles. These movements are highly diverse, encompassing property owners, municipalities, neighborhood associations, environmental organizations, and mobility or planning experts. Their motivations range from environmental and health concerns (soil degradation, pollution, biodiversity, climate change) to socioeconomic issues (territorial fragmentation, economic impacts on alternative routes) and heritage preservation (loss of landscapes, homes, and cultural sites).
Potential topics may include the following:
- The expansion of national and international road networks and their contestation
- Discourses on capacity, induced traffic, safety, and efficiency
- Transnational knowledge circuits in motorway development
- Assumptions behind transportation governance and urban planning
- Motorways as space of escape and the ways markers of social difference (race, ethnicity, gender…) affects motorway users.
- Road ecology or more specifically motorway ecology
- Alternative projects to motorways or removal and transformations
- Sociospatial inequalities and silences in motorway refusal histories
This special issue will be edited by Suzy Blondin, Manon Espinasse, Andrea Pimentel Rivera and Tiphaine Robert. The editors (with Transfers editorship) will select the contributions based on originality, relevance and scientific quality.
1 We use the term motorway to refer to a road exclusively dedicated to automobile traffic (characterized by high speeds, limited access, and a specific morphology and set of standards, such as the separation of carriageways, the possible presence of a central reservation and specific signage). This choice does not preclude the use of other terms such as highway, freeway, expressway or equivalent designations, provided that they correspond closely to the definition of motorway. We also invite authors to specify and clearly define the term they choose to employ and we recognize that the variety of the terms used will also reflects the authors‘ geographical origins and local realities.
SUBMISSION INFO
Abstract deadline: 15 April 2026
Please send your abstract to tiphain...@unibe.ch The abstract should include:
Name, affiliation and e-mail address
Short biography (100 words)
Extended abstract of 1000 words including the title of the article, a mention of the relevant topic/research questions addressed.
For more information, please do not hesitate to contact us. Journal website: https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/transfers/transfers-overview.xml
Karen Pinto - "From the Ground Up: Understanding the Islamicate Vision of the Thughūr al-Shāmiyya" – Entangled Histories Online Seminar Series [Announcement]
We are pleased to announce the thirteenth session of the seminar series "Entangled Histories: Borders and Cultural Encounters from the Medieval to the Contemporary Era", supported by the Faculty of Communication and the Master’s Programme in Media and Cultural Studies at Üsküdar University.
Seminar Details
Title: From the Ground Up: Understanding the Islamicate Vision of the Thughūr al-Shāmiyya (Cilician Frontier with Syria) through KMMS maps of the Mediterranean
Speaker: Dr. Karen Pinto (University of Colorado-Boulder)
Date: March 11, 2026
Time: 17:00 (Central European Time) — Please check your local time here: Time Zone Converter
About the Seminar
For seven centuries, the Thughūr al-Shāmiyya—the frontier entrance into Anatolia from Northern Syria—was one of the most contested battlefields in world history. As powers vied for control of the mountainous bottleneck coastal route into the Cilician Plains, the region became a focal point of medieval geopolitics.
In this seminar, Dr. Karen Pinto investigates the depiction of this heartland on medieval Islamicate maps of the Mediterranean (Ṣūrat Baḥr al-Rūm), specifically within the Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik (KMMS) manuscript tradition. By analysing the "place and space matrix" of the thughūr, Dr. Pinto offers a fresh methodology for reading medieval cartography. Through an on-site experiential examination of the sites marked—such as al-Maṣṣīṣa and ʿAyn Zarba—and by identifying the "starting point of the gaze" of the medieval cartographer, this paper illustrates how these maps shaped the Islamicate vision of the Mediterranean and its strategic boundaries.
About the Speaker
Dr. Karen Pinto is an Associate Scholar in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder and a globally recognised authority on Islamic cartography and its intersections with Ottoman and European mapping traditions. With over thirty years of dedicated research, she has built a unique repository of more than 3,000 Islamic maps.
Her award-winning monograph, Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2016), received the prestigious Choice Outstanding Academic Title distinction. A scholar of iconography and spatial studies, Dr. Pinto’s work has been supported by major grants, including a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship. Her research continues to bridge the gap between pre-modern manuscript studies and modern Digital Humanities, challenging our understanding of how cartographic images defined the boundaries of the pre-modern Muslim world.
Logistics
- Location: Online via Zoom.
- Meeting Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88680154241 (Please note: We are using a new secure link for our sessions).
- Seminar Series Programme: https://sites.google.com/view/entangledhistories/programme
- Entangled Histories Home: https://sites.google.com/view/entangledhistories/home
Join us to explore the intersection of medieval geography, cartographic imagination, and frontier dynamics. All are welcome.
Contact Information
Organised by: Ester Cristaldi (Üsküdar University) and Elisa Ramazzina (University of Insubria)
The 