A core tenet of ISHI is the cultivation of a scholarly network that promotes education and critical engagement with spatial history methodologies across disciplines. ISHI advances this mission by convening working groups, hosting events, and engaging in international networks. Scroll down to learn more about how ISHI is cultivating community and networks around the spatial humanities.
The Place, Space, and Critical Geography Reading Group brings together faculty and students interested in theories, methods, and case studies related to place, space, and critical geography, with a focus on how physical and social landscapes both shape and are shaped by power relations, identities, and social struggles.
The goals of the reading group are to build and support a collaborative community at Pitt around the critical study of place, space, and geography; and to compile a collective bibliography of key texts that engage with these themes, from disciplines including history, anthropology, art and architectural history, sociology, urban studies, geography, and related fields.
The Place, Space, and Critical Geography Reading Group will meet three times during the Fall 2026 semester. Please complete this form to join the group! All events will take place in 3500 Posvar Hall from 2:00 PM–3:15 PM.
- Wednesday, September 16: Stuart Dunn, A History of Place in the Digital Age
- Wednesday, October 28: Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
- Monday, November 16: Maggie O’Farrell, Land
The Spatial Humanities Works-in-Progress Seminar is designed as a collaborative forum for sharing works-in-progress and offering constructive feedback and support for projects still in development.
We invite faculty and graduate students from any discipline to workshop a draft of a current project that engages with spatial humanities or the history of space and place in some way. This might include projects that use maps or spatial data, analyze landscapes or regions, foreground place-based archives, or otherwise treat space and place as central to their questions. Each session will consist of an hour-long discussion which may include pre-circulated work in the form of a paper, outline, website, map, dataset, syllabus, or other creative work on which you would like feedback. Participants will also have the opportunity to explore how to articulate spatial questions more explicitly and how to incorporate appropriate spatial technologies into their work.
Please complete this form to join the group! All events will take place in 3500 Posvar Hall from 2:00PM-3:15PM.
Fall 2026 Schedule
Wednesday, September 9: Anjali Vats (School of Law) will present on “Rhubarb Nationalism,” an interdisciplinary study of how the creation of a market for Yorkshire rhubarb has transformed the economic and cultural landscape of a predominantly white, working-class region in northern England.
Wednesday, October 7: Runxiao Zhu (University Library System) will present on enhancements to the interactive map interface of Pitt’s Contemporary Chinese Village Gazetteer Data, a collection of rare first-hand datasets that serves as a critical access point to primary research materials on contemporary China.
Wednesday, October 21: Anika Walke (CMU, History) will present a chapter from her book manuscript examining the spatial legacies and memorial landscapes of the Holocaust and World War II in Belarus.
Wednesday, November 4: James Pickett (History) will share a project about mapping the Islamic World that interrogates what we talk about when we talk about the Islamic world.
Wednesday, November 11: Susan Lucas (Urban Studies) will present on the history and meaning of vacant land to residents of Swissvale Borough and how this knowledge might inform future reuse strategies.
Wednesday, December 9: Mina Rajagopalan (History of Art & Architecture) will share a project that explores the maps and landscapes of early modern Bombay through the story of Catherine Braganza.
The Pittsburgh Spatial History Working Group is a collaborative community of scholars, practitioners, and enthusiasts dedicated to exploring the intersections of spatial history, geography, and place-based studies within the Pittsburgh region. Through workshops, seminars, mapping projects, opportunities for students, and public engagement, we aim to deepen understanding of Pittsburgh’s spatial history, whether through historical mapping, geographic information systems (GIS), studying urban planning, tracking environmental change, documenting struggles over dwelling and occupying space, or writing narratives about cultural landscapes.
In Fall 2026, ISHI welcomes the inaugural cohort of undergraduate interns through the Interconnected Places Lab Internship. This three-credit internship will give students the opportunity to investigate a historical place and trace its connections across local, regional, and global networks, while developing skills in historical research, spatial analysis, digital mapping, and storytelling. Students will work on semester-long research projects using tools including GitHub, QGIS, Leaflet, and Java, with projects culminating in a published digital story. ISHI Research Associate, Dr. Palak Vashist, will serve as the internship instructor, guiding students as they explore how places connect to broader histories of migration, labor, infrastructure, memory, ecology, and contested boundaries. We’re thrilled to begin this new initiative and look forward to seeing what our first cohort discovers!