Basler Lecture
JOHNSON CITY (Feb. 21, 2018) – “Map-making, Landscape and Memory: A Comparative Measuring of America and Ireland” is the topic of the second of four free public lectures offered this spring at East Tennessee State University by Dr. Liam Campbell, chairholder of the 2018 Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence in the Arts, Rhetoric and Science.
In this lecture, which will be held Thursday, March 1, Campbell will examine and contrast the “measuring” and mapping of America with the unique mapping project of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in the mid-19th century and the lessons that can be learned from each.
“I have always been fascinated by maps and their colonial and other uses,” Campbell says. “What especially fascinated me as a child were the grid and straight lines of the maps of the USA compared to the irregular boundaries of Irish parishes, counties and provinces.
“I am concerned here with the uneven battle between the power to shape and flatten worlds, which are defined more by accounting, geometry, mathematics and perspective mapping on the one, and on the other, Gaelic and indigenous worlds, where such maps were either unknown or not formally used and where territories and peoples were ruled and administered mainly by the words and living images associated with manuscripts, memory, local lore and myth.”
This free public talk will begin at 7 p.m. in Ball Hall, room 127. Upcoming lectures in the series are scheduled for the same time and location on April 3 and 24.
Campbell is the “Built and Cultural Heritage Officer” for the Lough Neagh Landscape Partnership in Northern Ireland. His main area of research is the exploration of the history and heritage of place and space in the Irish landscape as a vital element of national heritage and identity. Throughout his career as an academic, community relations officer, television producer and priest, Campbell has worked to help communities tell their stories.
During his time as ETSU’s Basler Chair this spring, Campbell is teaching two courses: “Scots Irish in Appalachia” and “Northern Ireland: Negotiating Peace, Heritage and Identity.”
For more information, contact Jane MacMorran, director of Appalachian, Scottish and Irish Studies in ETSU’s Department of Appalachian Studies, at macmorra@etsu.edu. For disability accommodations, call the ETSU Office of Disability Services at 423-439-8346.