2023 Conference Speakers

Trained as both historian and computer engineer, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi’s research into the history of West African cities combines a set of interdisciplinary interests in cartography, technology, and digital humanities. Her forthcoming book, "Imagine Lagos," explores the city’s 19th-century history, rebuilding its past as a series of encounters: between men and women, between the past and present, enslaved and free, Eko (the old town) and Lagos, and between the land and lagoons. Her research has been funded by the Andrew Mellon, Woodrow Wilson and Hellman foundations. She teaches classes on Africa, urban history, digital storytelling and maps at the University of California, Riverside, where she is an Assistant Professor of History. 

Mamata Akella has been a professional web cartographer for over a decade, building maps and technology for Esri, the National Park Service, CARTO, Stamen, Facebook, and now Felt. She loves pushing the limits of cartography on the web and working on cross-functional teams to build cartographic thinking into products used by both technical and non-technical users.

RJ Andrews is a practicing data storyteller who helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. He recently produced designs for The White House and MIT. RJ's first original artwork, an elevation map of California created on an antique typewriter, was just acquired by David Rumsey Map Collection for Stanford University.

RJ's passion is studying the history of information graphics. He published Information Graphic Visionaries, a new book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators: Emma Willard, Florence Nightingale, and E.J. Marey. Each volume has new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public. The books are available from Visionary Press.

Benjamin Benus is an associate professor of art and design history at Loyola University New Orleans. He specializes in the history of modern art, with a focus on twentieth-century graphic design in Europe and the United States. He completed his PhD in art history at the University of Maryland in College Park, and he earned a BFA and an MS in art history from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. His scholarship, which examines historical connections between modernist design and data visualization, has been supported with research fellowships from the Vienna Circle Institute at the University of Vienna, the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. Benus is the author of Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury (RIT Press, 2023) and co-curator of the exhibition ‘Concept of a Visualist’: Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas, which opened in June 2023 at the Aspen Institute’s Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies in Aspen, Colorado.

Gabriella Evergreen is a candidate for the M.S. in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute with advanced certificates in Digital Humanities and Spatial Analysis and Design. Her research looks at mapping applications in the digital humanities and participatory counter-mapping. Her work also explores the use of textiles and fiber arts as embodied data visualizations. Her piece QUILT: Queer Intimacies Located in Thread was exhibited at the HASTAC 2023 conference and the 2023 Western Association of Map Librarians Conference.

Ken Field is a permanently recovering academic from the UK with a Bachelors in cartography and PhD in GIS. He grew tired of faculty meetings and the incessant hunt for research funding, ditched his 20-year academic career, and moved to the US where he talks and writes about cartography, teaches map design, and makes maps at Esri in California. As a passionate educator he helps people make better maps. He has presented and published an awful lot, and is author of two award-winning books, Cartography. (2018), and Thematic Mapping (2021). He’s active on social media and served as Chair, and now Vice-Chair, of the ICA Map Design Commission. He also served as Editor of The Cartographic Journal for 9 years, and is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Cartography. He’s won a few awards for maps, books, teaching, and kitchen tile designs. He teaches a MOOC on Cartography which has so far had over 200,000 participants, which is the largest classroom he’s taught in. He is co-founder of mappery.org. He snowboards (reasonably), plays drums (badly) and is a long-suffering supporter of his home-town Premier League football team Nottingham Forest. Maps are his passion, and his profession.

Michael Friendly is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Professor of Psychology and coordinator of the Statistical Consulting Service at York University, and an associate editor of the Journal of Graphical and Computational Statistics. He received his Ph.D. in psychometrics and cognitive psychology from Princeton University. His current research work includes the development of graphical methods for data visualization (where he is a principal innovator of novel methods for visualizing categorical and multivariate data), and the history of data visualization. In the latter, he directs The Milestones Project, a comprehensive catalog and database of the principal developments in the histories of thematic cartography, statistical graphics and data visualization. He is author of multiple books and numerous research papers on these topics. His most recent book (with Howard Wainer) is A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication, Harvard University Press (2021).

Mel Imfeld is a mapping, data viz and creative coding enthusiast with an academic background in urban planning and GIS. She leads Map Design at Mapbox, a team of passionate map designers who are building the next generation of digital maps. Mapbox maps power anything from a New York Times cover story to the navigation applications in your car that help you to get from A to B. Mel’s team builds custom maps and designs the Mapbox Core Styles, a selection of ready-made templates that help customers getting started with a great map for any use case in Mapbox Studio. Most recently, Mel’s team designed Mapbox Standard, the latest addition to the Mapbox map template family. A passionate explorer of the outdoors, Mel is testing Mapbox mapping products (Strava) in her trail running and hiking adventures all over the world.

Elspeth Iralu (Angami Naga) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Planning at the University of New Mexico. A 2022-2023 postdoctoral Mellon Fellow at Stanford University, her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Foundation, and the Naga American Foundation. Iralu’s research in Indigenous studies, critical geography, and transnational American studies centers Indigenous geographies and examines how everyday militarism, enacted transnationally, shapes global colonial relations. Her writing has appeared in American Quarterly, The New Americanist, and Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography and she is a member of the Editorial Collective of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies.

Stacy Levy works with rain, urban tides, and watersheds, using a blended language of science and art to tell the ecological story of a site. Stacy’s artworks give new understanding to the life of water on sites ranging from river surfaces to parking lots. Some of her works highlight the unseen life forms inhabiting local water, while other projects create a home for the rain on the site. In making large-scale works Levy works closely with engineers, landscape architects, ecologists, hydrologists, and biologists to create treatment solutions for water pollution, places for infiltrating and celebrating stormwater runoff, and habitat creation for birds and insects.

Stacy works at many scales from puddles to watersheds. She steers her projects to collaborate directly with natural processes while creating a visual metaphor for how urban nature works. Stacy has an enduring love of urban tidal rivers. She has worked with urban tides in the East River and the Hudson River in New York City as well as the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia.  She recently completed on a project new East Midtown Greenway in Manhattan to magnify the forms of common diatoms living in the East River, turning ordinary paving into an underfoot experience of the delicate architecture of micro algae. Currently Levy is working on a large-scale map of the Alameda Creek watershed, etched into three stone terraces at the Alameda Creek Watershed Center in Sunol, CA.

Karen Lewis is an Associate Professor of Architecture at The Ohio State University whose research and teaching address how visual and information systems shape the architectural, territorial and infrastructural space they create and inhabit. She theorizes the entanglement of how these spaces rely upon and embed information into their structures, systems and organizational logics through design and writing. As an undergraduate at Wellesley College, Professor Lewis was introduced to complex spatial mapping when studying astronomy. The star charts, stellar classification tables, and other graphics used to describe complex multi-dimensional spaces inspired her research into how graphics organize space. She worked in New York as a museum exhibition designer, user-interface designer, and a toy-design researcher before beginning her Masters in Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she completed her thesis on the organizational logics of the Port of New York and New Jersey.  While teaching at the University of Kentucky, Professor Lewis designed a community outreach studio with the Bluegrass Stockyard, a livestock logistics center, and initiated a novel funded model for design research between the academy and private sector. 

As Associate Professor of Architecture at The Ohio State University, Professor Lewis has expanded her research in the graphics of spatial complexity, turning her attention to the stories hidden within archives. She has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, the Newberry Library, and through the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the 19th-century visualization strategies, maps and graphic tools of the transcontinental American west, with a focus on the visualizations of the Army Corps of Topographic Engineers. She has also written and lectured about the ways archives hide and structure knowledge through their architecture, environment and user-interfaces. Her book, Graphic Design for Architects (Routledge 2015) pedagogically positions issues of architectural representation through the lens of information design and visual communication, and is one of the publisher’s best performing architecture publications of the 21st century. 

Currently, Professor Lewis’s research explores the ways the Underground Railroad is described across space and interpretation, using architectural representation to propose critical counter-narratives. Her visualizations of the Underground Railroad was featured in 2022 in Crossings: Mapping American Journeys, an exhibition at the Newberry Library, which visualized three stories of men and women who escaped slavery and created their Underground Railroads. By expanding archival narratives, researching historical maps and records, and linking architectural, topographic, and urban conditions across current landscapes, the mapping project gives insight into both the performance of those who created their paths out of slavery, as well as cartographic tools that engage research, design and audience participation. 

Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist and counter-cartographer. She creates maps and mappings that bring the politics of place to the surface. She has mapped public parks in Los Angeles; territorial disputes in the Arctic; and wastewater economies in New York City. She is co-editor of the book/map collection "An Atlas of Radical Cartography,” a project that significantly influenced the conversation and production around mapping and activism. Since 2016, she has been working on Walking the Watershed, a long-term engagement with the landscape, history, and politics of New York City’s water supply, and the relationship between the City and the mostly rural communities that supply its water. 

Exhibitions include the Sharjah (U.A.E.), Gwangju (South Korea) and Pittsburgh Biennials, "Greater New York" (PS1, NYC), "Experimental Geography” (touring), and “Diagrams of Power” (OCAD, Toronto) She has lectured extensively about her work nationally and internationally. She has received grants from the Graham Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Danish Arts Council. She has been an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and at Fresh Kills landfill. More about her work is at www.publicgreen.com.

Garrett Dash Nelson is a historical geographer who serves as President & Head Curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. His research interests combine the urban and regional landscape history of North America, the relationship between geographic knowledge and politics, and the digital geohumanities. His published work has appeared in both scholarly journals such as Journal of Historical Geography, PLoS One, and Progress in Human Geography, as well as public venues such as Places Journal and The Boston Globe. At the Leventhal Center, he has curated numerous physical and digital exhibitions, including “Bending Lines: Maps and Data From Distortion to Deception.” He holds an AB from Harvard College, an MA from the University of Nottingham, and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gilles Palsky was trained in history and geography at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure of Saint-Cloud, France. He holds an agrégation in geography (1981), a PhD (1990) and an Accreditation to direct research in geography (2003).

He is Emeritus Professor of Geography at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, where he taught among other subjects, cartography, the history of geographic thought, of cartography and of urban planning (2007-2022). He is a member of the research unit Epistemology and History of Geography (French National Center for Scientific Research).

He chaired the History of Cartography Commission of the French Committee of Cartography (1999-2007) and was a founding member and a trustee of the International Society for the History of the Map (2013-2017). In this capacity, he organized the second ISHMap symposium at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, in 2014 on the theme "Mapping Conflicts, Conflicts in Maps".

His research focuses on the role of images in the construction of scientific knowledge and on the history of thematic maps and atlases (18th-20th century). He is also working on several theoretical issues in cartography:  visualization of spatial dynamics, participative mapping, semiology of graphics.

Daniel Rosenberg is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. He is an intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe with a focus on the history of information and information graphics. His books are Histories of the Future and Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline. Rosenberg has published in a range of venues including Representations, Journal of the History of Ideas, Isis, Media History, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Art Journal, and LA+. Recent publications include “A Map of Language” in Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era (2020), “Search” and “Data” in Information: A Historical Companion (2020), “Keyword” in Information Keywords (2021), “Word” in Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (2021), and “The Brick Pencil” in Making Things International (2023). He is also editor-at-large and contributor at Cabinet Magazine.

Susan Schulten is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Denver, where she has taught since 1996. Her books include Emma Willard: Maps of History (2022); A History of America in 100 Maps (2018); Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (2012); and The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950 (2001). She is also a co-author of Constructing the American Past: A Sourcebook of a People’s History (2018, 2024). She is currently researching a book about Richard Edes Harrison, who dazzled Americans with his creative maps and data visualizations at mid-century. Her work has been funded by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2025-2026 she will serve as the Colorado State Historian. Professor Schulten teaches courses on Civil War and Reconstruction, America at the turn of the century, the history of American ideas and culture, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Great Depression, the Cold War, war and the presidency, and the methods and philosophy of history.

Jan Trachet studied archaeology at Ghent University between 2006 and 2010 and spent one semester at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. In his masters dissertation, he focused on the detection of submerged medieval villages in South East Zeeland. Subsequently, he completed the National Teaching Qualification for History at Ghent University and a post-graduate course in GIS at the University College Ghent. Since January 2013 he has been part of the Historical Archaeology Research Group (HARG) at Ghent University, first as a fellow of a Research Project that focused on the development of the medieval port zone between Bruges and the Zwin (2013-2016) and next as a junior-postdoc making a landscape-archaeological and cartographic study of the painted maps of Pieter Pourbus (2018-2022). Currently, he is studying the Maritime Cultural Landscape of the Belgian coastal plain as a postdoc in two projects: High Tide – Low Tide (2022-2024) and Blue Balance (2022-2025). In the past ten years, he has also developed a keen interest and skills in different forms of science communication and public archaeology.