Chet Van Duzer | Lazarus Project, University of Mississipi, USA
Board member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Mississippi, which brings multispectral imaging to cultural institutions around the world. He has published extensively on medieval and Renaissance maps in journals such as Imago Mundi, Terrae Incognitae, Word & Image, and Viator. He is the author of Johann Schöner’s Globe of 1515: Transcription and Study, the first detailed analysis of one of the earliest surviving terrestrial globes that includes the New World; and (with John Hessler) Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps.
His book Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps was published in 2013 by the British Library, and in 2015 the same institution published his book The World for a King: Pierre Desceliers’ Map of 1550. Brill has just published a book he co-authored with Ilya Dines, Apocalyptic Cartography: Thematic Maps and the End of the World in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript. His current book project is a study of Henricus Martellus’s world map of c. 1491 at Yale University based on multispectral imagery.
Tony Campbell | Independent researcher, United Kingdom
Graduate from Cambridge University (Modern History). He was Map Librarian of the British Library (1987-2001) and, since 1993, chairman of Imago Mundi Ltd. In that capacity he continues to act as co-ordinator for the biennial International Conference on the History of Cartography (ICHC). He has been a co-organiser of the 'Maps & Society' lecture series at the Warburg Institute, London since 1991, and has maintained the gateway website for the history of cartography, 'Map History', since 1997. In 1975 he discovered the first English sea atlas of the East, by Martin Llewellyn (c.1600).
Among his publications are The Earliest Printed Maps, 1472-1500 (1987); 'The Drapers' Company and its school of seventeenth century chart-makers' (1973); and an extended chapter, 'Portolan charts from the late thirteenth century to 1500', in Volume I of The History of Cartography, edited by J B Harley and David Woodward (Chicago University Press, 1987). In 1986 he published the first systematic census of surviving charts up to 1500.
Returning to research into portolan charts in 2011, he has published online a continuing series of essays and listings relating, inter alia, to toponymy, island colour and shape, workshops, Benincasa, the charts' functions, as well as a new census of surviving examples. Last year he carried out a detailed analysis of the Carte Pisane.
Ramon Pujades | Museum of Barcelona, Spain
Born in Valencia (Spain) in 1972, is currently the Research Manager of the Museum of History of Barcelona (MUHBA). Previously he was the Head of the Royal Heritage Section of the Crown of Aragon Archives (Barcelona). He has been a member of the Professional Association of State Archivists, Librarians and Archaeologists of Spain since 2001, and has served as Associate Professor in the Department of Ancient History and Written Culture at the University of Valencia and Senior Researcher at the Inter-University Institute of Valencian Philology. Among many other studies on the matter, he is the author of Les cartes portolanes: la representació medieval d’una mar solcada / Portolan Charts: The Medieval Representation of a Ploughed Sea (2007, Catalan-English bilingual edition with visual catalogue) and La carta de Gabriel de Vallseca de 1439 / Gabriel de Vallseca’s 1439 Chart (2009, Catalan-Spanish-English multilingual edition).
Richard Pflederer | Independent researcher, USA
Began his study of portolan charts in the year 2000 when he was invited to produce a detailed digital catalogue of the collection of the British Library. In the years that followed he has completed detailed catalogues of six other important collections, including NMM (Greenwich), Bodleian Library (Oxford), Huntington Library (California), Library of Congress (Washington), the Newberry Library (Chicago) and Archivio di Stato (Florence). In addition, he has extensively studied charts in the collections several other institutions in Italy and France. He has also assembled and published a detailed census of all known portolan charts, including as many in private hands as are known (2009).
His book Finding their Way at Sea (HES & DE GRAAF 2013) is a heavily illustrated work intended to introduce the subject to a general audience. His work with the charts, which he prefers to call manuscript sea charts, has expanded to cover broader issues in the history of navigational practice in the medieval and renaissance periods. He is a graduate of Northwestern University (Illinois) and has completed programs at Columbia University (New York) and the Thunderbird School of Global Management (Arizona). He is the founder of the Williamsburg (VA) Map Circle and a member of the Steering Committee of the Phillips Society of the Library of Congress and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He and his wife, Sue, share their time between Williamsburg and Montepulciano in Tuscany.
Patrick Gautier-Dalché | Researcher, France
Began studying history in 1975 and has completed his doctorate degree in History, in 1986 at the Univerité de la Sorbonne with the thesis "La «Descriptio mappe mundi» de Hugues de Saint-Victor. Texte inédit avec introduction et commentaire, Paris, Études Augustiniennes, 1988" and initiated research on the Representation of Space in the Middle ages, in 1996. Patrick Gautier-Dalché has written several books and research papers and has taken on several collective responsibilities on scientific commities, editorial team, and organization of colloquiums.
He is emeritus Director of Studies at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, section of Historic Sciences and Philology and emeritus Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherce Scientific - Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes in Paris.
Sarah Tyacke, University of London, United Kingdom
Sarah Tyacke CB, Hon. D.Litt., FSA, FRHistS, Distinguished Senior Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is also a former president of the Hakluyt Society, and now chair of the JB Harley Trustees who give grants for research in the history of cartography. She is a director of the journal Imago Mundi. She was formerly Keeper of Public Records and Chief Executive of the National Archives of England and Wales 1992-2005. In 2010 Sarah was awarded the British Academy's President's Medal, "for signal service to the cause of the humanities and social sciences".
Previously, she was Director of Special Collections at the British Library and before that Helen Wallis’s deputy in the Map Library of the British Museum/ British Library 1968-86. Her own research is in map and cartographic history and she has made, inter alia, a number of relevant contributions to history of early modern charting including 'English charting of the river Amazon c. 1596-1630' Imago Mundi, 32(1980) Catalogue of maps, charts and plans in the Pepys Library, (1989) and ‘Chart-making in England and its context, 1500–1660’ (History of cartography vol.3 (2007) and Gabriel Tatton's Maritime Atlas of the East Indies, 1620-1621. Imago Mundi (2008). She continues to research and write in this field.
Catherine Delano-Smith, University of London, United Kingdom
Catherine Delano-Smith graduated in geography from the University of Oxford, researched environmental change in the coastlands of Mediterranean Europe, and then taught at the universities of Durham and Nottingham and, briefly, in London. Catherine Delano-Smith is currently a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and has been the Editor of Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography since 1994. She has written and taught on a range of topics in the history of maps and mapping and is presently lead researcher and co-ordinator of the Gough Map Project.
Luis A. Robles Macías | Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
With a professional background in engineering and knowledge management, Luis is currently a PhD candidate in History at Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he is studying the life and works of sixteenth-century mapmaker Juan Vespucci.
He has published research on the history of cartography and geographical discoveries in journals like Imago Mundi, Revista de Indias, e-Perimetron, Journal of Ottoman Studies, Revista de Historia Naval and Anuario de Estudios Americanos. He is the editor of the magazine Maps in History, published by the Brussels Map Circle.
Former Advisor
Corradino Astengo, independent researcher, Italy (1937-2022)
Graduate in Law and in Geography from the University of Genova and in Political Sciences from the University of Pavia. He has carried out field works in Sri Lanka and in other islands of Indian Ocean. He has been full professor of Geography in the DiSAM (Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità, del Medioevo e Geografico-Ambientali) of the University of Genova. He has lectured “History of Geographical Discoveries”, “History of Cartography”, “History of Travel and Tourism” for the degree course in Geographical Sciences. He has been Visiting Professor in the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where he has kept a “summer institute” for a select group of lecturers. In 2003 he has been invited to keep the annual “E.G.R. Taylor Lecture” in the Royal Geographical Society of London. He retired in 2009 but continues to work as an independent researcher. Among his main research fields are the history of medieval and Renaissance cartography, the history of the discovery of the “new worlds” and the history of medieval pilgrimage. He is the author of books, articles and reviews published in Italian and foreign periodicals and he contributed the chapter “The chart tradition in the Mediterranean” for volume 3 “Cartography in the European Renaissance” of the multi-volume “The History of Cartography Project”.