Carolina Martinez

Carolina Martinez is an associate researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina. In 2014, she obtained her PhD in Modern History at the University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot and the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and currently teaches at the UBA and the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), where she conducts research on the relationship between travel accounts and cartographic images in the early modern period. She has been a visiting professor at the Universidade do Estado de Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She has been a invited researcher in the DEA programme in 2020. She is a trustee of the International Society for the History of the Map (ISHMap) as well as a list-editor of the H-Maps digital forum.

Title: A History of the Polar Regions. Visualizations, Hermeneutic shifts and Global Perspectives (16th-18th C.)

This project examines the insertion of the Polar Regions in the early modern imago mundi by analyzing the processes of visualization and the production of knowledge of the boreal and southern extremes of the known world developed by explorers, cosmographers, cartographers and editors in the course of the 16th and 18th centuries. While recent historiography has focused on the history and ways of visualizing the landscapes, populations, flora and fauna of the territories and seas in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle, the Southern antipodes and the relationship between both Polar Regions have risen less attention. Considering the importance of addressing such topics in light of the evanescence of Polar landscapes and ecosystems due to the current climate crisis, the project proposes that the visual and discursive elements that shaped an image of the Northern limits of the globe were decisive in the construction of a geographical, literary and political imaginary of the South Polar Regions.

Keywords: History of Cartography; Cultural History; Early Modern History; Overseas European Expansion; Geographical Thought

Selected publications