Map Matters: Cartographic Approaches to Cultural Production Across Languages
Interdisciplinary Symposium
21-22 May, 2026, University College Cork and online
Keynote speaker: TBC
The event is organized by the CASiLaC (Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures) cluster “Rethinking Spatial Humanities” at University College Cork.

Cartographic approaches have become one of the most productive methodological bridges across the humanities, not because they offer a neutral mirror of the world, but because they provide a rigorous way to formulate spatial claims as scholarly arguments. Work in critical cartography has made it difficult to treat maps as transparent containers of facts, urging us instead to attend to the conventions, authorities, and rhetorical effects through which mapping produces knowledge (Harley 1989; Wood 1992; Pickles 2004). In this spirit, the symposium foregrounds mapping as research practice: a set of modelling choices and interpretive procedures through which scholars make spatial questions legible, contestable, and comparable across languages and traditions (Murrieta-Flores and Martins 2019; Wilson 2017).
We invite papers from researchers in literary studies, history, art history, film and media studies, cultural geography, museum and heritage studies, and adjacent fields, especially those developing projects that include a mapping component or that reflect critically on mapping within their discipline. We welcome contributions that connect theory to practice and that articulate how spatial modelling shapes evidence, scale, and inference, from literary cartography and atlases of fictional worlds (Moretti 2005; Piatti and Hurni 2011; Tally 2014; Engberg-Pedersen 2017) to the challenges of representing uncertainty in narrative space (Reuschel and Hurni 2011), as well as to domain-specific cartographic methodologies in history and historical GIS (Knowles and Hillier 2008) and in digital art history (Lozano 2021).
The symposium is explicitly multilingual and transmedial. We are interested in mapping practices across media, including cinema and moving-image cultures (Caquard and Taylor 2009), comics and graphic narratives (Peterle 2018), and multimodal forms that call for renewed vocabularies for describing what maps do inside and around cultural artefacts (Mantzaris 2023). Across these contexts, mapping is treated as an interpretive method that makes its own conditions explicit: what counts as place, how ambiguity is encoded, how uncertainty is visualised, and how digital infrastructures and their limits shape humanistic questions (Wilson 2017; Murrieta-Flores and Martins 2019). We welcome work grounded in European and non-European languages and archives, as well as comparative projects that confront the translation of place across scripts, toponymies, and uneven historical records
Possible topics and directions may include (but are not limited to):
• Cartographic visualisations across media (literature, cinema, comics, art, sound, digital forms)
• Mapping movement: itineraries, mobility, circulation, trade routes, touring cultures, pilgrimage
• Colonial and postcolonial cartographies, counter-mapping, and Indigenous mapping practices
• Maps as narrative devices: embedded maps, diagrams, paratexts, atlas forms, itinerary genres
• Geographies of memory: monuments, museums, commemorative routes, contested heritage
• Methodological reflections: GIS, geocoding, place-name ambiguity, toponymic politics
• Analog practices: hand-drawn mapping, sketch cartography, participatory mapping, ethnographic approaches
• Pedagogy and public humanities: teaching with maps, exhibitions, community projects, publishing and storytelling
• Comparative and translational approaches: mapping across languages, scripts, and uneven archives
• Epistemology of cartography in the humanities: limits of mapping and “unmappable” subjects
Please submit your proposal (title, abstract, short bio, and disciplinary area) by 5 March 2026 via the google form at this link: https://forms.gle/jzr4fAFdyamP7Gn58 . The presentations will be held in English. The symposium will run in two formats: online (Thursday, 21 May 2026) and in person (Friday, 22 May 2026). On the form, you will be asked to select one of these two modes of participation.
For information, contact Dr Alessio Aletta at aaletta@ucc.ie

Bibliography
Caquard, Sébastien and D. R. Fraser Taylor. “What is Cinematic Cartography?”. The Cartographic Jounral 46.1 (2009). 5-8.
Engberg-Pedersen, Anders. Literature and Cartography. Theories, Histories, Genres. MIT Press, 2017.
Harley, John Brian. “Deconsturcting the Map”. Cartographica 26.2 (1989). 1-20.
Knowles, Anne Kelly and Amy Hillier (eds.). Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship. ESRI, 2008.
Lozano, Jorge Sebastián. “Mapping Art History in the Digital Era”. The Art Bulletin 103.3 (2021). 6-16.
Mantzaris, Thomas. “Understanding Maps after Multimodal Literature: A New Taxonomy”. Cartographic Perspectives 101 (2023). 10-24. DOI: 10.14714/CP101.1771
Mapping Art History in the Digital Era
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. Verso, 2005.
Murrieta-Flores, Patricia, and Bruno Martins. 2019. “The Geospatial Humanities: Past, Present and Future.” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 33.12 (2019). 2424–29. DOI:10.1080/13658816.2019.1645336.
Peterle, Giada. “Orientarsi tra le nuvole: cartografie, atlanti e pratiche mappanti nel racconto a fumetti”. Between 8.15 (2018).
Piatti, Barbara and Lorenz Hurni (eds.). “Cartographies of Fictional Worlds”. The Cartographic Journal 48.4 (2011). 218-223.
Pickles, John. A History of Spaces. Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. Routledge, 2004.
Reuschel, Anne-Kathrin and Lorenz Hurni. “Mapping Literature: Visualisation of Spatial Uncertainty in Fiction”. The Cartographic Journal 48.4 (2011). 293-308.
Tally, Robert (ed.). Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative.Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Wilson, Matthew W. New Lines. Critical GIS and the Trouble of the Map. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. Guildford Press, 1992.

Conference Organiser:
Dr Alessio Aletta, Department of Italian, UCC, Cork

Scientific Committee:
Giulia Bernuzzi, Department of Italian, UCC, Cork
Dr Shawn Day, Department of Digital Humanities, UCC, Cork
Dr Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez, Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, UCC, Cork
Dr Jesse Peterson, Department of Geography, UCC, Cork
Dr Barbara Siller, Department of German, UCC, Cork