Daily schedule
After registration on Sunday afternoon, we invite you to a welcome meeting in the Amersi Lecture Theatre in New Quad, where you will meet your tutors. Join us in Deer Park afterwards for our opening drinks reception, followed by dinner in Brasenose’s historic dining hall (informal dress).
Seminars take place on weekday mornings. Most afternoons are free, allowing you time to explore Oxford, enjoy a variety of optional social events (see details below), or to sit back and relax in one of the college's atmospheric quads.
Your course culminates on Friday evening with a closing drinks reception and gala farewell dinner at which Certificates of Attendance are awarded. For this special occasion smart dress is encouraged (no requirement to wear dinner suits or gowns).
Social programme
We warmly invite all Inspiring Oxford students to take part in our optional social programme, with all events provided at no additional cost. Events are likely to include:
- Croquet on the quad
- Chauffeured punting from Magdalen Bridge
- Expert-led walking tours of Oxford
- Optional visit to an Oxford Library or the Ashmolean Museum
- River Thames afternoon cruise
- Quiz night in the college bar
- Scottish country dance evening (where you do the dancing!)
Seminars
Monday
Reading maps and the earliest maps of the world
We start with a discussion of how we can use cartography as a tool to think about more than just the places they show. We will think about who has made maps, as well as how and why. From here, we will discuss some of the earliest maps of the world made in Babylon, ancient Greece and China.
We will also imagine how cultures mapped many things. For instance, in the Peutinger Table, they depicted power by sowing the extent of the Roman Empire. In Hereford’s medieval Mappa Mundi we are presented not only with a map of the world but also of the path to salvation, heaven and hell.
Tuesday
Mapping conquest and discovery
In the age of European conquest and colonisation, map makers set out to represent on paper and on globes the world that was being discovered. Today, we will explore how such maps not only reveal the process of discovery and the limits of the known world, but also power and violence. We will look at maps created by cartographers such as Waldseemüller (c.1470-1520) which showed the newly discovered Americas as a thin strip of land; great multivolume atlases created by individuals like Joan Blaeu (1596-1673), and missionary maps as records of colonisation. We will also consider a selection of maps made by indigenous cultures and communities demonstrating a world that did not rely solely on European cartographers.
Wednesday
Cartographies of nature
Today, we will explore how mapmakers have attempted to capture the earth and the heavens, and their contours, depths, biodiversity and geography. Often treated as scientific and objective, we will explore how such cartographies also represent ideas about the known and unknown world. We will discuss the famous Mercator projection of 1569 which tried to map the curve of the earth onto a flat surface, as well as geological maps such as those of the 18th century geologist, William Smith, showing rock strata. We will examine maps of the Milky Way and of the heavens, cartographic catalogues of mountains, rivers, and forests, as well as spatial records of living things revealing that they not only document the natural world, but reveal the limits of human perception.
Thursday
Maps of modernity
As maps became more accurate, precise and reproducible, they began to be used for different purposes. Today, we will consider a range of maps associated with political, economic and social developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some of which were designed to support administrative and political control such as the Cassini family’s nearly 200-sheet topographic map of France. Others mapped disease and poverty, such as John Snow’s Broad Street Cholera Map depicting the clusters of cholera cases in the London epidemic of 1854.
Maps were made for military campaigns, transport networks, resources, planning and tourism, and reflected new ways of seeing the world from different perspectives. We invite you to explore the relationships between maps and nation, the industrialised world, the world of leisure, and the fight for social welfare.
Friday
Mapping today and tomorrow
In our final seminars, we will examine how mapping has changed in the contemporary world with new techniques from sourcing data for maps to digital technologies transforming cartographic possibilities. We will see how Google Maps, with street view and live view, has made the world more accessible and knowable, how GPS has transformed the way we travel, workout, and even interact.
We will explore how these new modes of mapping are changing the way we see the world. We also investigate how maps might attempt to imagine futures and depict worlds yet to come.
