Steven Seegel

E-Books of MAP MEN are now available, starting at 10 USD! Due to copyright laws, I am unable to post the full book online. There is a Google Preview with 40 pages of free text. If you're interested in purchasing it, you may use my 20% discount code UCPNTN or UCPNEW to order the book directly at University of Chicago Press, while copies last.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo27760776.html                       

MAP MEN -- BOOK PREVIEW
More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel re-creates the public and private worlds of East Central Europe’s geographers as they interacted with and influenced one another. Multilingual geographers played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations­—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars. Seegel’s innovative book reexamines not only key treaties but also the families and friendships, generational sagas, and interrupted professional lives that lay hidden in the history of science and technology, the everyday microworlds behind the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons why East Central Europe became the dramatic stage of such developments.

The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book.

Mapping Europe’s Borderlands takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through an entirely new prism, that of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, Seegel explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the East Central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, Seegel explains how Russia used cartography in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, formed its geography society as a cover for gathering intelligence. He also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. Seegel concludes with a consideration of the impact of cartographers’ regional and socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, families, career options, and available language choices.

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the geopolitical placement of Ukraine drew the attention of some of Europe’s most influential cartographers. Many of these maps, including ones of exceptional rarity, were collected by the Ukrainian scholar and journalist Bohdan Krawciw.

Krawciw traced the physical and aesthetic depiction of Ukraine across its changing borders as a means of self-recognition and as a cultural and political history of the contested nation and its peoples. Of special interest are his maps of Ukraine from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the crossroads of four empires: Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet.

As part of his personal archive, Krawciw’s maps were bequeathed to Harvard University upon his death in 1975. This book serves as both a catalog of his collection and a description of how the maps he collected serve as an invaluable source for Ukraine’s history and a symbol of Ukrainian national identity. The book contains nearly 100 examples from the collection, many in full color, as well as indices listing maps by cartographer and by place name.

Even with the Russian–Ukrainian war in the background, in these four books there is
plenty of cause for optimism concerning the state of Russian, Ukrainian, and East European
scholarship. Readers interested in new interdisciplinary angles for the study of nations and
empires will find room for dialogue and a wealth of historiographical knowledge, as well as
literary, archival, and periodical research on geography, nationality, and identity.

http://podcast.iu.edu/Portal/PodcastPage.aspx?podid=60ea1c46-d673-41f9-a76e-a6e6dd4178ca

Podcast of two invited public talks, on "Russian-Ukrainian Borderlands" and "Map Men" (book preview), at Indiana University's 2017 Summer Workshop in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages (SWSEEL), July 13-14, 2017, Bloomington, Indiana.

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. Map Men takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution.

My paper takes a transnational look at the lifeworlds of the multilingual soil scientist Arkadz Smolich, the geographer, professor, and " map man " of the first independent Belarusian Republic (BNR) and Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR), up until the social democrat's eventual arrest, transfer into the interior, and execution by the NKVD under Stalin in 1938. In my case study, I move beyond an instrumental focus on the circulation or transfer of knowledge as rational modernity, and cover instead three main aspects of Smolich's life, professional work, and mapping practices as a highly valued figure in Europe's eastern borderlands. These are, first, his enduring transnational identity, particularly across newly drawn borders after the Treaty of Riga (1921); second, his mobility and loose transactability as a professionalized "bourgeois expert" (in Lenin famous designation) and contributor to the republic's agroeconomic development; and third, his disposability as a (geo)politicized asset, a civil servant of Stalin's Soviet statist company-empire of the 1930s. I conclude with a discussion of precarity and agency in the history of the 20th-century East European technical intelligentsia.