Prof. S. Max Edelson

S. Max Edelson studies the history of colonial British America and the Atlantic world. He is also a digital humanist interested in historical geospatial visualization. His research examines space, place, and culture in colonial North America and the Caribbean. His first book, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Harvard, 2006) examines the relationship between planters and environment in South Carolina as the key to understanding this repressive, prosperous society and its distinctive economic culture.  His second book, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence (Harvard, 2017), describes how Britain used maps and geographic knowledge to reform its American empire in the eighteenth century. The New Map of Empire features a free companion website with a dynamic digital archive of more than 257 maps and charts discussed in the book.

Edelson and Research Professor Bill Ferster were awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Implementation Grant in 2012 to develop MapScholar at UVa's SHANTI (Sciences, Humanities, and Arts Network of Technological Initiatives).  MapScholar is a dynamic visualization tool for historic map collections.  It offers a free, open-source portal that gives scholars the ability to bring together high-resolution map images from a variety of sources, analyze them in rich geospatial contexts, and use them to illustrate new interpretations in the history of cartography.  They also collaborated together on VisualEyes, broadening the toolset for HTML5-based interactive visualizations geared toward historical topics.

Edelson and Professor Alan Taylor direct the UVa Early American Seminar at Monticello, an ongoing research seminar jointly sponsored by the Corcoran Department of History and the International Center for Jefferson Studies.  The intellectual center of our dynamic graduate program in colonial, Revolutionary, and early national history, the EAS is a community of scholars that includes PhD students, faculty, and visiting researchers who meet regularly to share and critique works in progress.