2017 Golz Lecture: Kären Wigen

Professor Kären Wigen presented the 2017-2018 Golz Lecture

Entering Asia

Wednesday, November 15, 2017
7:30 PM
Location: Kresge Auditorium, VAC

About the Lecturer:

The 2017-2018 Golz Lecturer, Kären Wigen, is the Frances & Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University.  The co-author, with Martin Lewis, of The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (1997), her most recent books are, as author, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 (2010), and, as co-editor, Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps (2016).

About the Lecture: Entering Asia

The idea of Asia as a continent was introduced to the Chinese and their neighbors by the Jesuits in the 1600s. But how did East Asians see themselves in early modern times? Drawing on Chinese and Korean manuscript maps as well as colorful Japanese woodblock prints from the 17th to 19th centuries, this visually rich lecture surveys how East Asian mapmakers crafted their own imaginative syntheses of Confucian cartography, Buddhist cosmology, and European geographical categories.