about me

My name is Miguel Angel Chavez, and I am currently a first-year PhD student at Vanderbilt University. I graduated with my M.A. in History at the University of North Texas in 2015, and my B.A. in History from the same school in 2011. 

My research is focused on the intellectual and scientific assumptions underpinning imperial cartography during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. In my M.A. Thesis The Shifting Borders of Egypt, I outlined the intellectual and cultural assumptions of cartographical representations of Egypt in the context of Egypt's military successes under Muhammad Ali, and later Egypt's incorporation into the wider British Empire by 1882. Specifically, I focused on the Greco-Roman and Biblical references cartographers unconsciously used. These includes a "temporal stasis" of the drawing of Egypt's border with Palestine, the use of Herodotus and Ptolemy when demarcating the Egyptian/Sudanese border, and the lack of engagement in indigenous modes of knowledge and geographies.

My own work can be categorized as part of the wider History of Science, and I am expanding my own research to the development of Geography, Surveying, and Cartography at large. 

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prolegomena is my personal website/blog, a place where I can expand on my research, and where I can comment upon the happenings of the world. 

If you have any questions or comments, you can find me in the following places: