February 14, 2019, Panel 2 "Fifth Part of the World": Carla Lois, Chet Van Duzer, and Corin Braga present their papers. For more panel videos, click here.

"Quinta pars or terra incognita? Verisimilitude in the cartographic representation of the unknown" is curated by Carla Lois. Lois has a degree in Geography and a PhD in Philosophy and Literature (History area) from the University of Buenos Aires. She is an Independent Researcher at CONICET. She works as a Full Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and at the National University of La Plata in the areas of the history of geographical thought and cartography. She coordinates the History and Epistemology Group of Cartography and Technical Images (FfyL, UBA www.ghecit.org), is co-editor of volume 5, dedicated to the 19th century, in The History of Cartography Project published by the University of Chicago Press and Editor-in-Chief of the periodical monograph series BRP Map History (Brill, Amsterdam). With the support of specialized scholarships she has carried out postdoctoral research stays abroad (CNRS-Sorbonne Paris 1, University of Barcelona, John Carter Brown Library (Providence, RI), British Library (London), Institute for Research in the Humanities-University of Wisconsin (Wisconsin and Milwaukee), Katholieke Universitet Leuven (Leuven), Kenyon College (Ohio), The Newberry Library (Chicago), Museum of Astronomy and Allied Sciences (Rio de Janeiro), Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (Berlin). In her research work she is dedicated to the fields of geography, history, and cartography, territorial history, visual culture and the link between images and scientific thought, and cartographic images. She is interested in discussing the ingenuity with which we look at images and, for that, she sometimes discusses sensitive issues that problematize geographical common sense, geopolitical fanaticism, nationality and nationalism. Among her books are Maps for the Nation. Episodes of the history of Argentine cartography (Biblos, 2014) and Terrae Incognitae. Ways of thinking and mapping unknown geographies (Eudeba, 2018).

"Imagined Territories around the South Pole: The Southern Ring Continent, 1515-1554" is curated by Chet Van Duzer. Van Duzer is a board member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester, 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 is now available in editions in German, Russian, and Chinese (both mainland and Taiwan). His book The World for a King: Pierre Desceliers’ Map of 1550 was published at the end of 2015 by the British Library, and in 2016 Brill 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 recent NEH-Mellon project at the Library of Congress was a study of the annotations in a heavily annotated copy of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography; more recently he held a David Rumsey Research Fellowship to study Urbano Monte's manuscript world map of 1587.

"The Invention of Terra Australis Incognita" is curated by Corin Braga. Braga is a Romanian scholar and prose writer. He is a university professor in comparative literature and the Dean of the Faculty of Letters of the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. He has a PhD in Literature (from Babes-Bolyai University, Romania, 1997) and a PhD in Philosophy (from Université Jean Moulin, France, 2008). He is the director of Phantasma, the Center for Imagination Studies (www.phantasma.ro) in Cluj, of the academic journal Caietele Echinox (phantasma.lett.ubbcluj.ro, Meniu Echinox Journal), and of the book-collections Mundus Imaginalis (Dacia publishing house, Cluj) and Phantasma (Tracus Arte publishing house, Bucarest). He is a Correspondent Member of the Academia de Ciencias de Buenos Aires, Argentina, the vice-president of the Romanian Association of General and Comparative Literature and the vice-president of the Centre de Recherches Internationales sur l’Imaginaire (CRI2i).