Panel Discussion

Mapping Contagion at New York Public Library

Wed, Apr 3, 2019

3:30 PM–6:00 PM

Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, NYPL, 476 Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street

How have researchers used or created maps as objects of study? Join us for a research methods event with a distinctly cartographic focus. Through the unifying lens of infectious disease, each presentation will start by looking at one item from the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division before expanding out to reveal the role of mapping in their given research field. Scholars and curators from the worlds of public history, medicine, and sociology will discuss the variety of methodologies they use, and there will be time to visit the exhibition Mapping Contagion: Representing Infectious Disease in New York City, currently on display in Room 117 at the New York Public Library. The event will bring together the core partner organizations from the Wellcome’s Contagious Cities project, including the New York Public Library’s Maps Division, Tenement Museum, New York Academy of Medicine, Museum of the City of New York, and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, as well as introducing researchers working on related themes.

This event is free and open to the public, but RSVP is required to attend, please click here to RSVP.

Schedule:

3:30-4:30pm: Panel 1

Anne Garner, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at The New York Academy of Medicine Library, “Swill milk, fever-nests, and insalubrious quarters: Mapping nineteenth-century New York’s nuisances”

David Favaloro, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Hebrew Technical Institute Research Fellow, Lower East Side Tenement Museum,“Mapping the Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and Disease with the Tenement House Commission”

Gergely Baics, Associate Professor of History and BPH Endowed Faculty Chair of Urban Studies, Barnard College,“Mapping Density and Crowding as Indicators of Public Health: Exploiting the 1852-54 Perris Atlas of New York City”

4:30-5:00pm: Break

5:00-6:00pm: Panel 2

Ian Fowler, Curator and Geospatial Librarian for the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public Library, “Curating Mapping Contagion at NYPL”

Kerri Culhane/Stefano Morello, co-curators of The Lung Block: A New York City Slum & Its Forgotten Italian Immigrant Community (NYC Dept of Records, April-October 2019), “Putting the Lung Block on the Map”

Rebecca Hayes Jacobs, Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, Museum of the City of New York, “Mapping the Meanings of Contagion in Germ City“

Co-hosted by the New York Public Library and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Sponsored by Wellcome, as part of Contagious Cities.