Matthew Edney

Matthew Edney studied for a B.Sc. in geography at University College London before moving to the U.S.A. for graduate work in geography, cartography, and the history of cartography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton for five years before moving to USM in 1995, at which time he declared himself a willing refugee from GIS and digital mapping. USM has allowed him to focus on his specific interests in map history, which have steadily expanded from the history of surveying technologies and their role in nineteenth-century European state formation and imperialism to encompass the wider practices and performances of map making in Europe after 1600, and more particularly in the British Atlantic World, 1650-1800. It was in this capacity that he was recruited as a coeditor for Cartography in the European Enlightenment, volume 4 of The History of Cartography. Since 2005 he has also directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin, dividing his time between there and USM.