Making Contact: Maps, Identity and Travel

When civilizations first encounter each other a cascade of change is triggered that both challenges and reinforces the identities of all parties. Making Contact revisits key encounters between cultures in the medieval and early modern world-Europe and Africa, the multiple ethnicities of greater Poland, Christians and Jews, Jesuits and Japanese, Elizabethans vs. aboriginals and vagrants, English and Algonquians, Pierre Radisson and the Iroquois, and the Spaniards in America.

Glenn Burger, Lesley Cormack, Jonathan Hart, and Natalia Pylypiuk teach at universities across North America and are all members of the Medieval and Early Modern Institute. Glenn Burger teaches in the Departments of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research interests include issues of sex, gendre and sexuality in medieval literature, especially Chaucer, as well as East/West relations. He is the editor of Hetoum's A Lytell Cronycle (Toronto, 1988), co-editor with Steve F. Kruger of Queering in the Middle Ages (Minnesota, 2001), and author of Chaucer's Queer Nation (Minnesota, 2002).

Lesley B. Cormack is Deputy Vice-Chancellor & Principal, UBC’s Okanagan campus and past dean of arts. Her research interests include history of geography in early modern England, images of empire, and the social context of the scientific revolution. She is the author of Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620, co-author of A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility, and co-editor of Mathematical Practitioners and the Transformation of Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Europe.