Occupations and the Occupied: Agency, Expertise, and Patronage in Wartime and Postwar Historical Cartographies

The 2024 Vega Symposium honors Steven Seegel, Distinguished University Professor at University of Texas (UT) USA, who has been awarded SSAG’s Vega Medal 2024 for his scientific contributions to Human Geography.

Steven Seegel has made important contributions to the field of critical cartography and political geography and is recognized as one of the foremost experts on the study of cartography in and about Eastern and Central Europe, in particular Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Germany. In his recent book Map Man, Steven Seegel provides an insightful analysis of the development of geography as a discipline in Eastern and Central Europe. He shows in this book how the seemingly systematic ways offered by the young discipline of geography for mapping a complex and diverse borderland actually reflected, for better or worse, the various political preferences of the cartographers and/or the geopolitical interests of their rulers. The manner in which maps and cartography are political technologies of empire are themes in Seegel’s research.

VEGA program (147 Kb)