Email: william.rankin@yale.eduResearch Areas: Physical and earth sciences since the mid-nineteenth century; military, industrial, and governmental science; history of cartography; science and architecture; visual studies; environmental history.
Bill Rankin’s research focuses on the relationship between science and space, from the territorial scale of states and globalization down to the scale of individual buildings. He is particularly interested in mapping, the environmental sciences and technology, architecture and urbanism, and methodological problems of digital scholarship, spatial history, and geographic analysis (including GIS).
His forthcoming book, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016), is a history of the mapping sciences in the twentieth century. It tracks the shift from the god’s-eye view of the paper map to the embedded experience of GPS, and it analyzes the role of new forms of mapping both in the macropolitics of decolonization and the rise of US global military power and in the micropolitics of everyday subjectivity and the unexpected uses of new technologies.
