Jordana Dym will be collaborating with the faculty and students in the BorderWork(s) lab and completing the second half of her manuscript: The World Displayed: The Cartography of Western Travel Writers, 1600-1930, which studies the connections between travel writing and mapping from the age of sail to the dawn of airships, and links travelers’ cartography to the histories of science, knowledge, empire, and nation.

Having begun her career as a historian working on Central American independence in the age of Atlantic revolutions (1750-1850), she has since integrated trans-national, visual, and public history into her teaching and research.  She has participated in academic institutes on popular cartography, museums, and visual culture; incorporated visual cultures, travel narratives, and historical maps into her classes and into an interdisciplinary text co-edited with geographer Karl Offen, Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago 2011); organized an exhibit of American acts of independence at the Mexican national archives; and piloted Skidmore College’s first course in public history.

With the BorderWork(s) lab, she will collaborate on their planned Nasher Museum of Art exhibit, Lines of Control, a show that will forefront cartography’s intersections with art works, and BorderWork(s)’s associated conference on cartography, empire, and postcoloniality.

Professor Phil Stern, co-director of the BorderWork(s) lab cites Professor Dym’s extensive experience and imaginative engagement with liberal arts undergraduate education, public history, and curatorial work, which promise “remarkably fruitful col(lab)orations in cultivating a variety of undergraduate initiatives currently underway as well as for developing unforeseen new ones as we move forward in our final year.”

Professor Dym holds a BA in History and MA in Russian and East European Studies from Stanford University, and a PhD in History from New York University.  At Skidmore, she served as Director of the Latin American Studies Program from 2007-2011 and has taught about travel writing and cartography on campus and in travel seminars in Paris, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. She has been a fellow at the John Carter Brown Library and Columbia University’s Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris, and a recipient of NEH and J.B. Harley research fellowships.  She looks forward to doing history in collaboration with the BorderWork(s) lab faculty, staff and students, and to a snow-free winter.