I've been drawing maps for as long as I can remember. Borders of empires I was half-remembering from class, place names I wasn't sure how to spell, coastlines that were probably wrong. At some point the habit became a practice and the practice became this.
In 2014, while living in Belgium, I painted my first serious map: an endonym map of Europe, showing place names as local languages use them rather than as English has borrowed or distorted them. Bruges and Brugge are the same city. München and Munich are the same city. Working through those translations, I kept asking what the borrowed name carried and what it obscured — whether the English version of a place was a neutral convenience or something more like a quiet erasure. That question has followed me through everything since.
I studied history at Georgetown and then spent a Fulbright year in Innsbruck, working at a history and art museum while developing the research that would later anchor my graduate work. Being embedded in the material culture of Central Europe — the objects, the archives, the specific texture of how that part of the world remembers itself — changed how I thought about historical evidence. Primary sources are the residue of people trying to hold onto worlds that were ending.
At Oxford, where I completed my master's in European History, I focused on the late Holy Roman Empire: its legal culture, its constitutional logic, the extraordinary complexity of an entity containing hundreds of semi-sovereign jurisdictions that somehow called itself a polity. My dissertation examined the Congress of Rastatt (1797–1799), the failed peace negotiations in which the Empire tried to come to terms with the world Napoleon was making. For a while I intended to pursue an academic career. I still think of myself as a historian first. But I found that the map was doing something the monograph couldn't — that a carefully researched visual object could hold historical complexity that argument often flattened. So I chose the map.
CartographyCraft grew out of a long-term personal project: a history of the world told entirely in maps, moving backward and forward in time, tracing the arc of major polities from the Akkadian Empire to the present. Each map represents weeks of research across multiple languages and historiographical traditions. The Ottoman map required reading sixteenth-century Turkish poetry. The Kathmandu Valley map meant learning a script I had never encountered before a commission brought me to it. Every project brings a new problem, and the problem is always, in its different forms, the same one: how did people in this place and time understand where they were, and how do you make that visible to someone who wasn't there?
The maps are hand-painted in watercolor and ink. The essays try to say what the maps are attempting to do.
To use the beauty of cartography to shed light on an often obscure past.
All views expressed here are strictly my own and do not represent those of the U.S. Government.