What is Intellectual Geography?

Intellectual Geography / Tuesday 6 September, 2011

While the term ‘intellectual history’ has a certain institutional currency and its own history of use, the idea of ‘intellectual geography’ is a new one. It signals how ideas vary across geographical space, but also the role space, place, and environment might play in shaping intellectual history. This lecture uses a range of examples to trace the relationships between intellectual geography, the history of geographical knowledge, and the historical geography of knowledge. In doing so it examines a range of geographies that shape intellectual life—the micro-geography of sites of intellectual life; the contextual geography of places and ideas; the scope, shape, and composition of networks; and the influence of environment and physical landscape—and some of the challenges faced by those seeking to map ideas.