ICOG visiting research fellow: Laura Lo Presti, University of Padua

From May 2019 to May 2020, Dr Laura Lo Presti from the University of Padua will join ICOG as a visiting research fellow.

Laura Lo Presti holds a PhD in European Cultural Studies from the University of Palermo (Italy). She is currently a research assistant in Cultore della materia of Cultural Geography at the University of Padua (Italy). Her research interests mainly regard the history and philosophy of cartographic thought. In her work, cartographic theory is fruitfully interlaced with visual culture and aesthetics, feminist and postcolonial studies, migration and border issues, everyday nationalism and imperialism. She has been recently awarded a national prize for ‘the best doctoral thesis in Geography’ by the Association of Italian Geographers (AGeI) and the FrancoAngeli Publishing house.

Mapping and the Making of Empire

During her stay at the University of Groningen, she will work in close collaboration with Prof. Luis Lobo-Guerrero in the research project of Mapping and the Making of Empire , exploring the role cartography has played historically in the development of European Empires and what this has to inform about Western modes of reasoning about order, power and governance. In particular, she will focus on the recent ‘post-representational’ turn in Map Studies (Dodge et al. 2009) and its emphasis on mapping as a quotidian, contingent and contextual performative practice of space-making and she will apply it to the realm of historical geography with the aim to reenact and retrace the everyday and vernacular consumption, other than the production, of maps and map-like objetcs at work in the Italian Fascism’s Empire. The discovery of an empire from below will help to understand the overlooked epistemic of cartographic artefacts as incubators of everyday imperialism as well as to unveil the material power of imperialism operating through such cartographic informality.

Visiting research fellowship programme

ICOG welcomes applications for visiting research fellowships from academics working in the fields of its five research centres. The duration of visits usually varies from a month to half a year. During this time, visiting research fellows are expected to work on their own research projects (ideally in collaboration with a scholar or an academic team from ICOG) and to participate in the events organised by ICOG.