Steven Seegel
Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (USA). He is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018). He has published Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013), and Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has been a contributor to the fourth and fifth volumes of Chicago's international history of cartography series, and has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by USHMM and Indiana University Press. Professor Seegel is a former director at Harvard of the Ukrainian Research Institute's summer exchange program. You can find him on Twitter @steven_seegel and as the host of author-feature podcast interviews on the popular New Books Network.
Address: Steven Seegel | he/him/his
Professor and Associate Chair of Slavic and Eurasian Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
UT Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Dept. of Slavic and Eurasian Studies
Burdine Hall 584
2505 University Ave., F-3600
Austin, TX 78712 USA
* follow me on Twitter: @steven_seegel
website: stevenseegel.com
Address: Steven Seegel | he/him/his
Professor and Associate Chair of Slavic and Eurasian Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
UT Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Dept. of Slavic and Eurasian Studies
Burdine Hall 584
2505 University Ave., F-3600
Austin, TX 78712 USA
* follow me on Twitter: @steven_seegel
website: stevenseegel.com
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Books by Steven Seegel
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.
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.
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.
Book Reviews by Steven Seegel
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Challenging Conversations" roundtable event at University of California, San Diego, Sponsored by the Institute of Arts and Sciences (IAH), Public Talk by Steven Seegel w/ Timothy Snyder, Amelia Mukhamel Glaser, Marci Shore, and Patrick Hyder Patterson, March 14, 2017.
Invited Public Lecture at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Lviv, Ukraine, March 26, 2015.
Invited Public Lecture at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, Ukraine, March 19, 2015.