Matthew Edney

Professor of Geography
Osher Professor in the History of Cartography
OML Faculty Scholar

207-780-4767

matthew.edney@maine.edu

314 Forest Avenue, Room 112, Portland Campus

Education

B.Sc. (hons.), Geography, University College London (University of London) 1983
M.S., Cartography, University of Wisconsin-Madison 1985
Ph.D., Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison 1990

Current Courses

GEO 170: Global History: Mapping the World Across Cultures
GEO 270: Mapping Environments and People: Data Visualization and Analysis
GEO 370: Maps, Territory, Power

Also: independent studies and internships within the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education

Guest Classes Taught

The following is a sample of the courses for which I have conducted guest classes on map matters, just in the five-year period of Fall 2013 through Spring 2018:

American & New England Studies (Graduate)

Museums and Public Culture

Art:

Carved, Warped, Twisted and Burned—Exploring the Book as Art

Introduction to Printmaking: Intaglio and Relief

Community and Planning Development (Graduate)

Global Planning Issues: Megacities and Megacity Regions

English

Early Women Writers

Entry-Year Experience

Norse Sagas and Skalds

Geography

Human Geography.

Urban and Regional Planning

History

Colonial America

Research, Reference, and Writing

History of Maine

History of Women in the United States

Honors

Global Ethical Enquiry

Interdisciplinary Introduction to Logic and Mathematics

Law

Maritime Law Seminar

Philosophy

Africa, Social Justice, and Exile

Political Science

1919: A Year in the Life

US Border Politics and Policy

Sociology

Sociology of the Body

Research Interests

Matthew is generally interested in all things cartographic, but especially map history. With work wrapping up on Cartography in the European Enlightenment, Volume 4 of The History of Cartography, he is pursuing a number of issues concerning the “ideal of cartography,” which is to say the body of concepts and presumptions that govern how people think about maps and mapping. These issues include: how the ideal developed; how it has shaped map studies generally, and map history in particular; how map scholars have failed to break free of the ideal, despite 50 years of debate; and how they might pursue an alternative approach to understanding the processes underpinning the many modes of mapping. More detailed information about his work as a map historian is available at his profile on the web pages for OML and on his personal website.

Geography-Anthropology Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education Muskie School of Public Service

Matthew Edney has a rather complex existence at USM. He is a professor of geography and (since 2007) the Osher Professor in the History of Cartography, with responsibility for courses in map history. He is also “faculty scholar” in the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education. Since 2005 he has directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 2022, he has also taught an intensive week-long course at Rare Book School, University of Virginia.

Regardless, he likes nothing more than helping people understand maps and their history!

As OML Faculty Scholar, Matthew has worked since 1995 to develop the collections, to interpret them, and to help the staff and the library’s readers understand various aspects of maps and their history. Although not formally a member of the OML staff, he has worked alongside the librarians to shape and organize their activities. He founded OML’s website and has created much of its content. He has curated several OML exhibitions, and organized several academic conferences. And he has offered many guest classes on map topics to a wide variety of courses (see below for a listing).

As Osher Professor in the History of Cartography and professor of Geography, Matthew teaches courses for USM undergraduates in maps and map history.

Matthew is a prominent map historian, with an international reputation. He is currently:

chair of the International Society for the History of the Map;
president of the American Friends of the J. B. Harley Research Fellowships, Inc.;
trustee of Imago Mundi, Ltd., also in the U.K., which publishes the main journal in the field and sponsors the biannual International Conferences on the History of Cartography; and
member of the International Cartographic Association’s Standing Commission on the History of Cartography.

Moreover, Matthew has since 2005 directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Project prepares the volumes of the award-winning series, The History of Cartography. All four of the series’ published volumes (1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3, 4 and 6) are available for free access from the publisher, the University of Chicago Press. Volume Five, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, is progressing well and will be submitted to the University of Chicago press in July 2025, for publication in print and as an e-book in July 2027.

Selected Publications

Matthew has an extensive publication record, of which he gives a full accounting on his personal website. His main works cover several arenas of interest, from official nineteenth-century surveys in the U.S. and British India, to the nature of map history as a field of study. In addition to Cartography in the European Enlightenment, his monographs are:

Cartography: The Ideal and Its History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-226-60554-8 cloth; 978-0-226-60568-5 paper; 978-0-226-60571-5 e-book.
The Origins and Development of J. B. Harley’s Cartographic Theories. Cartographica Monograph 54. Cartographica 40, nos. 1–2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. ISSN 0317–7173.
Mapping an Empire: The Geographic Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-226-18487-6 cloth; 978-0-226-18488-3 paper; 978-0-226-18486-9 e-book.
Edney, Matthew H., and Mary S. Pedley, eds. Cartography in the European Enlightenment. Vol. 4 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. ISBN: cloth 978-0-226-18475-3; e-book 978-0-226-33922-1.

Additional Publications

Edney, Matthew H. “Processual Map History.” In The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities, ed. Tania Rossetto and Laura Lo Presti, 38–46. London: Routledge, 2024.
Edney, Matthew H. “The First Facsimile Collections and the Parisian Origins of the History of Cartography.” Imago Mundi 75, no. 1 (2023): 2–23.
Edney, Matthew H. “Creating ‘Discovery’: The Myth of Columbus, 1777–1828.” Terrae Incognitae 52, no. 2 (2020): 195–213.
Edney, Matthew H. "Competition over Land, Competition over Empire: Public Discourse and Printed Maps of the Kennebec River, 1753–1755.” In Early American Cartographies, ed. Martin Brückner, 276–305. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011.
Edney, Matthew H. “Knowledge and Cartography in the Early Atlantic.” In Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c.1450–1820, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, 87–112. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Edney, Matthew H. "Simon de Passe’s Cartographic Portrait of Captain John Smith and a New England (1616/7).” Word & Image 26, no. 2 (2010): 186–213.
Edney, Matthew H. “John Mitchell’s Map of North America (1755): A Study of the Use and Publication of Official Maps in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Imago Mundi 60, no. 1 (2008): 63–85.
Edney, Matthew H. “Mapping Parts of the World.” In Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, ed. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr., 117–57. Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Field Museum and the Newberry Library, 2007.
Edney, Matthew H., and Susan Cimburek] “Telling the Traumatic Truth: William Hubbard’s Narrative of King Philip’s War and his ‘Map of New-England.’” William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 61, no. 2 (2004): 317–48.
Edney, Matthew H. “Theory and the History of Cartography.” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 185–91.
Edney, Matthew H. “Cartography without ‘Progress’: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking.” Cartographica 30, nos. 2–3 (1993): 54–68.