Biography

S. Max Edelson studies the history of British America and the Atlantic world. His research examines space, place, and culture in colonial North America and the Caribbean. He is currently researching and writing Ogilby's New World: Geography and Colonization in Restoration America. This book focuses on one of the most influential work of geography published in the second half of the seventeenth century: John Ogilby's America (London, 1671). It examines how European geographic knowledge--in text, maps, and other images--circulated among England's ambitious colonial founders as they settled and developed Jamaica, Carolina, New York, and Pennsylvania.  

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. It shows that although plantations often represent stasis in myths of the Old South, they were in fact dynamic instruments of empire. Plantation Enterprise was awarded the George C. Rogers Prize by the South Carolina Historical Society and the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society.  Harvard University Press published a paperback edition of the book in 2011.

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 book follows the surveyors who fanned out across frontier territories--from the frigid coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to tropical islands in the southeastern Caribbean--to make distant spaces legible from London. The schemes of colonial development and control that these maps envsioned, Edelson argues, helped provoke the reisstance that led to the American Revolution. 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. It was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize in 2017 and received the John Lyman Book Award for U.S. Maritime History by the North American Society for Oceanic History.

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.  Edelson received an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship in 2010 to begin this digital humanities research.

Edelson and Professor Christa Dierksheide direct the UVa Early American Seminar, an ongoing research seminar jointly sponsored by the Corcoran Department of History, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.  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.

Employment

Professor of History, University of Virginia (2018-)

Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia (2009-2018)

Associate Professor of History, University of Illinois (2007-2009)

Assistant Professor of History, University of Illinois (2001-2007)

Assistant Professor of History, College of Charleston (1998-2001)

GRADUATE STUDENTS

Lee B. Wilson (2014), “Masters of Law: English Legal Culture and the Law of Slavery in Colonial South Carolina and the British Atlantic World, 1669-1783,” Associate Professor of History, Clemson University

Mary S. Draper (2016), “The Tropical Metropolis: Cities and Society in the Early Modern British Caribbean," Associate Professor of History, Midwestern State University

Hannah K. Tucker (2021), "Masters of the Market: Ship Captaincy in the British Atlantic, 1680-1774," Assistant Professor of History, Copenhagen Business School

Nicole L. Schroeder (2021), "Incurable Defects: Medicine, Welfare, and Competing Conceptions of Disability in Philadelphia, 1730-1840," Assistant Professor of History, Kean University

Alexander Humes (2021), "Fortified Arguments: Fortifications and Competing Spatial Views of Colonial North America," Major, United States Army

Jennifer H. Levin (2023), "Material Diplomacy: Indigenous and European Networks of Exchange in French Mobile, 1699-1739," Collections Manager, George Washington Carver Museum, Austin, TX

Emily Sackett (2024), "Women Wanted: White Women and the Development of Early American Plantation Societies," Prospect Research Analyst, Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota

Donovan Fifield (2024), "Obligation & Tension: Credit, War, and Imperial Crsis in the British-American Northeast, 1688-1775," Postdoctoral Research, University of Tübingen

Noah Beissel (co-advised with Christa Dierksheide) (ABD), The Barbadian Diaspora in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Media Appearances

Public Lecture, "Catawba Cartographies: Remapping the Indigenous Southeast, ca. 1670-1733," Philip Lee Phillips Society/Washington Map Society, Library of Congress, May 2, 2024

Featured Speaker, "Episode 7: The Divide," Worlds Turned Upside Down, R2 Studios, May 1, 2024

Featured Speaker, "Episode 6: The Proclamation," Worlds Turned Upside Down, R2 Studios, March 22, 2024

Public Lecture, "The Surveyor's Eye: Topographic Mapping and the Contest for Empire in Eighteenth-century British America," NEH-SHARP Libing American History in Primary Documents Lecture, Rare Book School, June 5, 2023, Charlottesville, Virginia

Presentation, "After Cofitachequi: John Locke's Carolina Ethnography," La Brobe University Archaeology & History, May 12, 2021

Public Presentation, "The Mapping of America: An Interview with Dr. Seymour I. Schwartz," Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, April 3, 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia

Public Lecture, "The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence," Mapping the Georgian World: Global Power and Maps in the Reign of George III, October 9, 2018, King's College London

Video, S. Max Edelson and Ricardo Padrón on teaching a College of Arts and Sciences Forum on "Space, Knowledge, and Power"

Podcast Interview, Ben Franklin's World: A Podcast about Early American History, "Max Edelson, The New Map of the British Empire," episode 186, 2018.

Podcast Interview, Time to Eat the Dogs: A Podcast about Science, History, and Exploration, "Episode 54: The New Map of Empire," October 15, 2018.

Podcast Interview, Professor Buzzkill: History Myths Busted, The New Map of Empire, January 21, 2019.

Podcast Interview, New Books Network, The New Map of Empire, May 16, 2019.

Public Lecture, "Mapping Carolina: Cartography and the Quest for Empire in the Colonial Southeast," Drayton Hall Distinguished Speakers Series, April 17, 2014, Charleston, South Carolina