Bill Rankin is Associate Professor of History; Chair of the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research focuses on the intersection of science, technology, and geography, from the territorial scale of states and globalization down to the scale of individual buildings.
His latest book, Radical Cartography: How Changing Our Maps Can Change Our World (Viking, November 2025), is a historical, methodological, and practical exploration of data mapping. It argues for a new ethic of data visualization centered on the idea of visual argument. Instead of the “extractive visualization” of most contemporary mapping, which puts visualization in a subordinate position to “raw” data, it calls for a more interventionist and constructivist approach to spatial imagination grounded in the epistemic values of subjectivity, multiplicity, and uncertainty.
Please take note this lecture will take place on the first floor 3-133
