Steven Seegel: The Geographers Who Defined East Central Europe
Geopolitics & Empire
Geopolitics & Empire
4.2 • 570 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2018
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Professor of History Dr. Steven Seegel discusses his book “Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe” and how famous geographers such as Isaiah Bowman or Hungarian Prime Minister Count Pál Teleki influenced maps and policy in the 20th century.
Websites
https://twitter.com/steven_seegel
http://unco.academia.edu/StevenSeegel
Books
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo27760776.html
About the Guest
Steven Seegel is Professor of Russian and European History at the University of Northern Colorado. He is the author, most recently, of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe, which came out with University of Chicago Press in June 2018. He has also published Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013), and Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has been a contributor to the fourth and fifth volumes of Chicago’s international history of cartography series, and has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by USHMM and Indiana University Press. Professor Seegel is also a former director at Harvard of the Ukrainian Research Institute’s summer exchange program.
*Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On this edition of Geopolitics and Empire, we interview University of Northern Colorado professor of history, Dr. Stephen Siegel, to discuss his new book, Map Men, Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe. |
| 0:15.7 | We'll look at the lives of these mapmakers, what influenced them, and how they influenced geopolitics with their creations. |
| 0:23.5 | Thanks for coming on to the podcast, Dr. Siegel. |
| 0:26.1 | Thanks very much for the invitation. |
| 0:28.3 | So we're taking a slight detour from some of our usual topics on the geopolitics and |
| 0:33.9 | Empire podcast to expand a bit to look at history and the lives of some important |
| 0:39.0 | geographers because these are all things that at the end of the day influence and do have |
| 0:43.5 | geopolitical ramifications on our lives because these maps influence the way policymakers |
| 0:50.8 | view the world perhaps and base some of their decisions on. |
| 0:56.0 | And in the background of the lives of these geographers is the rise and fall of empires. |
| 1:02.0 | And so to start, could you just briefly give us your thoughts, whatever comes to mind, your views on |
| 1:09.0 | in general geopolitics, empire, and perhaps |
| 1:13.0 | their intersection with geography? |
| 1:15.8 | I think it's really important from the beginning to understand the range of scholarship |
| 1:23.8 | on empire. |
| 1:26.0 | And especially in the larger Russian, East European, and Eurasian field, |
| 1:32.8 | two of my big sources of inspiration have been the journals Critica and Abin Curio. Both of these |
| 1:41.9 | journal initiatives for academics and for experts came out of the fall of the Soviet Union, and I think came out of the understanding, which was a very big turn in the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s under the Bush years, that the United States was also an empire, |
| 2:04.5 | and that the United States should be included in the larger comparative transnational study of empires. |
| 2:16.0 | So some of the inspirations for me were these two journals. I remember when I was a |
| 2:21.8 | graduate student reading Dominic Levin, for example, or the work of Ron Sunni in the Soviet |
| 2:29.6 | field. And I kept thinking that there had to be a way through maps to understand geopolitics, |
... |
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