A writer, author and professor will visit Kalamazoo College to deliver the 2024 Moritz Lecture at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, April 18, in 103 Dewing. A livestream will also be available. 

University of Delaware Professor of English Martin Brückner will discuss “The Social Life of Maps in Early America: A Material History of Design, Technology and Nation-Building.” Brückner has been the acting director and director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, a co-director of the Center for Material Culture Studies, a co-director of the Delaware Public Humanities Institute, and a visiting curator of the Winterthur Museum. He also is known for writing more than 30 essays for journals such as American Quarterly, American Art, American Literary History and English Literary History; and two award-winning books, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 (2017) and The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006). 

Brückner’s honors have included the Fred B. Kniffen Book Award, the Louis Gottschalk Book Prize, and numerous grants and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the University of Mainz in Germany. 

The history department’s annual Edward Moritz Lecture honors the late professor Edward Moritz, who taught British and European history at K from 1955–1988 and served for many years as the department chair. For more information, contact the Office of Alumni Engagement at alumni@kzoo.edu or 269.337.7300.