Courses

Course Description:

Have your news feeds ever showed heartbreaking disaster maps?  Maybe this happened earlier in the year during the ongoing bombings of Ukrainian, Gazan and Sudanese cities, or when fires were consuming LA suburbs? Have you seen recent maps of illegal US military boat attacks in the Caribbean? The media world is filled with damage maps. We’re used to seeing disasters and wars as cartographic visualizations of data and comparative before-and-after satellite images of buildings, but what about the living beings who suffer death, loss, and displacement?

In this course you’ll contribute to humanizing damage cartography by engaging in an exciting new research project and scholarly network called Cartographies of Loss: The Afterlives of War. Course readings and assignments will be based around a recent network conference held at Carleton in September 2025. We’ll take recordings of conference lectures as well as texts authored by conference participants, pairing them with archival maps and other primary sources, to make sense of fresh scholarship in the fields of post-catastrophic urban history and disaster studies. Historical work will focus on Central Europe and the Middle East, but students are welcome to research any region in the world. Join this course, and you’ll get to co-create an online atlas of current and historical damage maps, building awareness of the impacts of war on human and other than human collectivities around the world.

If you have any questions about registering, or if you’d like to know more about the reading list, assignments, and evaluation, feel welcome to email me at any time for more information or just register and join us for the outline overview during the first class.