Participant Info

First Name
Katherine
Last Name
Parker
Affiliation
Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc.
Website URL
https://pitt.academia.edu/KatherineParker
Keywords
history of the book, history of cartography, history of maps and mapping, Pacific history, maritime history, history of exploration, history of empire, British Empire, naval history
Additional Contact Information

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a historian of the European encounter with the Pacific and Pacific exploration, specializing in the production and dissemination of geographic knowledge by European empires in the long eighteenth century. I study the voyages themselves, as well as the texts and material culture they produced. This research has led me to be an expert on book, map, and globe making and use in the early modern period and the eighteenth century. I can also speak to the history of exploration more generally, as well as the legacies of European exploration and imperial expansion in today’s political, social, cultural, and intellectual arenas.

Thanks to my research and my current position, I am adept at discussing cartography, maps, and their histories. I am the Research Officer at Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc, where I research our online collection of 60,000 map images, as well as coordinate map scholarship by answering historical inquiries, publishing, and planning a biennial conference held at Stanford University’s David Rumsey Map Center.

I also serve in the leadership of several scholarly organizations. I am the Administrative Editor of the Hakluyt Society, a Council Member of the Society for Nautical Research, and the Treasurer of the International Society for the History of the Map.

Finally, and most passionately, I am a teacher at the university level. I teach the history of maps and mapping at the London Rare Book School, and I also am a Teaching Assistant at Queen Mary University of London.

Recent Publications

* For access to any publications, please email me at kaparker18th@gmail.com *

‘Maps and Mapping, History of.’ Co-authored with Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger Kain. In Elsevier Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, 2nd ed. London: Elsevier, 2019 (digital book).

‘Memorializing Anson, the fighting explorer: a case study in eighteenth-century naval commemoration and material culture.’ In A New Naval History, edited by James Davey and Quintin Colville, 133-150. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019.

‘Pepys Island as a Pacific stepping stone: the struggle to capture islands on early modern maps.’ British Journal for the History of Science 51, no 4, ‘Science and Islands in Indo-Pacific Worlds,’ (2018): 659-677.

‘Storing and Sharing Secrets: Management of Pacific Geographic Materials in Early Modern European Empires.’ In Viaggiatori: Circolazioni scambi ed esilio, edited by Fabio D’Angelo, 165-85. Naples, Associazione culturale Viaggiatori, 2018.

‘London’s Geographic Knowledge Network and the Anson Account (1748).’ In The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices, edited by Elleke Boehmer, Rouven Kunstmann, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay and Asha Rogers, 23-46. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

‘The Savant and the Engineer: Exploration Personnel in the Narbrough and Anson Voyage Accounts.’ Terrae Incognitae 17, no. 1 (2017): 6-20.

‘Introduction.’ (co-authored with Quintin Colville and Elin Jones) Journal for Maritime Research 17, 2 (2015): 97-101. Part of a special issue on ‘Gendering the Maritime World’ co-edited with Quintin Colville and Elin Jones

‘Pocketing the World: Globes as commodities in the eighteenth century.’ IMCoS Journal no 141 (summer 2015): 47-53.

‘Rewriting Admiral Anson as Naval Hero: biographical depictions of Sir George Anson from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.’ The Trafalgar Chronicle, 24 (2014): 81-94.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Pacific, Britain, France, Spain
Expertise by Geography
Australia, British Isles, France, Pacific, Spain, United Kingdom, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
17th century, 18th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
Book History, Colonialism, Material Culture, Race