2026 Conference Program

Memorial University, St. John’s Newfoundland

Wednesday, 29 July.   Evening reception at the Crowsnest

Thursday, 30 July.  

8:30 am:  Registration—coffee/tea and pastries

9:00-9:10 am:  President’s Welcome

9:15-10:15 am:  Panel 1 – Newfoundland’s History

Chair:  Dan Duda, The Center for Newfoundland Studies

• Lydia Towns - To Secure “the honour, the historic interest, and all other advantages”: How Cabot Tower served to Unite a Community and Present John Cabot as Newfoundland’s Founder-Hero.
• Carson Phillips - Familial Memory and Island Industry: A Microhistory of J. W. Phillips and the Discovery of Newfoundland’s Interior

10:15-10:30 am: coffee/tea break

 

10:30-11:45am: Panel 2 – Pacific Islands and Empire

Chair: 

• Robert Caldwell - Rapa Nui: Island of Enigma in the “Age of Discovery”
• Tomer Elad - Searching for Islands: Navigational Perception and Environmental Interpretation in Eighteenth-Century British Pacific Voyages
• Serge Avery - Three Phases of Empire in the Equatorial Pacific: the 170 Year History of America’s Relationship with Howland Island

11:45 -1:15 Lunch – each person on their own

 

1:15-2:30pm: Tour of the Map Collection

 

2:30-3:45pm:  Panel 3 – Islands, Oceans, and the Imaginary

Chair: 

• Anne Good - Piscine Abundance: Fish as Cultural Objects in the Premodern World
• Amber Elisabeth Peters - From Tyre to Serendip: The mythical Alexander’s island travels in the search for the water of life
• Ciarán Drinnon - Out of Thin Air: Fata Morgana and Map Manipulation in the North American Arctic, 1818-1918

 

Annual Banquet in the evening . 

Friday, 31 July.  

9:00 – 9:30am: Coffee/tea/pastries

9:30-10:45am:  Panel 4 – Maps & Mindsets 

Chair: 

• Benjamin Olshin - Antilia, Antipodes, Atlantis: A Philosophy of Island Cartography
• Nathan Braccio - Indigenous Knowledge and Erasure in the First English Maps made in America
• Adrian Young - Trouble in the Natural Laboratory: Knowledge and Its Derangements on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands

10:45-11:00am: Coffee/Tea break

 

11:00 am – 12:15 pm:  Panel 5 – Aesthetics and the Production of Knowledge

Chair: 

• Chet Van Duzer - The Sonetti Template: Cartographic Persistence and the Aegean Isolario (1486-1658)
• Cortney Berg - Augustus the Strong and Aestheticized Navigation: Luxury Globes and Imperial Self-Fashioning in the Dresden Zwinger
• Wes Brown - The Dominguez and Escalante 1776 Expedition: Spanish Mapping that Revealed the Interior West

12:15 -1:15pm: Lunch and Business Meeting – boxed lunches provided

1:15-2:30: Panel 6 - Public Perception and Memory

Chair: Lauren Beck, Mount Allison University

• Dondy Ramos - Memorialising Voyages of ‘Discoveries’: The Vereegnide Oostindische Compagnie, the Duyfken, and the Re-Imagination of European Foundations in Australia
• Roman Cain - ‘The memory of these martyrs to duty’: Public Commemoration of the Greely Expedition from 1884-1893
• Mylynka Kilgore Cardona - Public Perceptions of a Lady Explorer - Alexine Tinne in Africa

2:30-2:45: Coffee Break

2:45-3:45pm: 2025 & 2026 Fellows Presentation Panel

Chair: (Maggie Ragnow?)

• Imre Demhardt - Who claimed Greenland? Owners, explorers, and mappers of the world’s biggest island 
• Lauren Beck - Approaches to Defacing Signs and Monuments Commemorating Exploration History

3:45-4:00 pm:  Closing Remarks

Saturday, 1 August

Optional Excursion

9:45 am:  Meet for a tour of St. John’s outside of MacPherson 

10:00-2:00 p.m:  Tour of St. John’s with Legend Tours