Date: Thursday, March 19, 2026
Location: The Newberry Library
Time: 5:30pm – 7:00 pm CT
Title: “Marco Polo, Amerasia, and French Exploration in the Sixteenth Century”
Speaker: Mark Cruse
Abstract: This illustrated lecture discusses the ways in which Marco Polo’s book, The Description of the World, shaped expectations about the inhabitants, resources, and size of the Americas in sixteenth-century France. Polo composed his book in French
in 1298, and the French nobility were among its earliest and most devoted readers. Polo’s Description was an essential reference for French cartography, cosmography, and exploration for centuries, and offers crucial insight into France’s early colonial activity.
Bio: Mark Cruse (PhD, New York University) is associate professor of French at Arizona State University. A medievalist, he has published on a wide range of topics including medieval theater, heraldry, writing tablets, the Louvre, Marco Polo, and global trade. His first monograph, Illuminating the Roman d’Alexandre (MS Bodley 264): The Manuscript as Monument (Boydell and Brewer, 2011), is a comprehensive study of one of the most famous medieval manuscripts extant. He has also published a translation of Catherine the Great’s memoirs (with Hilde Hoogenboom; Random House, 2005), and articles on Haitian literature and eighteenth-century battlefield medicine. Forthcoming in 2025 are two books: The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France: Texts, Objects, Encounters, 1221–1422 (Cornell) and L’Iconographie de l’ Epistre Othea de Christine de Pizan (with Gabriella Parussa; Brepols). He is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (fellowship 2013–14), and has twice been a fellow at the National Humanities Center (2017–18; 2024–25).
Date: Thursday, April 16, 2026
Location: The Newberry Library
Time: 5:30pm – 7:00 pm CT
Title: Performing landscapes, Mechanical spectacles, Long-maps and Panoramas.
Speaker: Nicholas Lowe
Abstract: In many respects immersive and panoramic media can be understood as a spatial viewing technology in dialogue with and adjacent to maps and mapping. Panoramas like maps render the lay of the land as an artifact to be scrutinized. And maps like panoramas facilitate both an actual and an imagined engagement with landscape. Central to both maps and panoramas is the production of a sense of “you are here”.
Robert Barkers Panorama was first presented in London’s Leicester Square, in 1787. At about the same time and in close proximity Philip James De Loutherbourg presented his Eidophusikon. Barkers initial name for his spectacle was ‘La Nature à Coup d’Œil’, or ‘Nature at a Glance’. The word ‘Panorama’ being coined shortly thereafter would enter the English visual vocabulary for its all-inclusive descriptive capacity. by contrast the Greek word ‘Eidophusikon’, which means simply, ‘Image of Nature’, would disappear almost without trace, though not without leaving its effects. In the case of an encounter with each in the 1780’s, the viewer’s subjective relationship with space and place is simulated to produce an immersive engagement with landscape. The Panorama being a life scale immersive simulation of a real place where the viewer is placed at the center of the panorama as a protagonist within a surrounding landscape. And the Eidophusikon, being a miniature-scale framed representation of a scene, a moving dimensional diorama-like picture of kinds, that showed the effects of nature upon landscape, and here the viewer is positioned very much as the spectator of a series of dynamic scenes. Both viewing formats remained popular for the duration of the 19th Century and each has an effective lasting media legacy that is arguably still evident in cinematic and virtual media up to the present day.
As an exploration of the relationship between maps and panoramic media, this presentation will discuss representations of landscape through literary and historical printed sources. With a focus on artifacts that represent space and demonstrate experiences of immersion, a sense of ways in which performativity is a central will be explored as a key aspect of the engagement with both maps and panoramic media. Lowe will share aspects of his recent research and the talk will reference materials from the British Library, the City Of Westminster Archives, the Maclean Collection, and The Newberry Library.
Bio: Nicholas Lowe is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, author, and teacher, working through drawing, photography, video, performance, and installation. His recent research, writing and material studio work is focused on memory, landscape and muti-modal panoramic media. He holds tenure in Historic Preservation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2022 Lowe received the Maclean Map Research Fellowship where he is engaged in ongoing studies of panoramic media and its influence upon map formats and map image making.
Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026
Location: The Newberry Library
Time: 5:30pm – 7:00 pm CT
Title: “Our 3 Majors Killed Here”: Public and Private Maps of World War I
Speaker: John Scheckter
Abstract: After the Australian Imperial Force evacuated Gallipoli in 1915, Major R. F. Fitz-Gerald acquired a souvenir map of the battle zone, and marked it with symbols and captions to show his own experience there. We will look closely at this map, its origins and purposes, and at Fitz-Gerald’s continued practice of overwriting and annotating documents, as he transformed mass-produced, often banal, public records of war into meaningful, even therapeutic, personal memoranda of survival.
Bio: John Scheckter is a retired Professor of English and the author of Major Fitz-Gerald and the Matter of War: An Anzac Archive (2021).