About Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talks
The Summer Scholars season of lunchtime talks is hosted by the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the Library and showcases the exciting and wide-ranging research into our Americas collections by the Institute’s Visiting Fellows and associates, as well as Library staff.
Free. No need to book, just drop-in.
Mapping Women
Human beings have tried to map our worlds – and our sense of what the world is – since prehistoric times. Maps have been used to wage wars, divide up land and resources, and claim ownership. But, like all histories, the history of cartography has been overwhelmingly composed of maps made by men. Pragya Agarwal reflects on the challenges of looking for unnamed and hidden women mapmakers in the archives and the way she learnt to listen to the silences for her latest book.
Development, Planning, and Knowledge in Venezuela’s Guayana Project
In the 1960s, the Venezuelan state launched the Guayana Project to transform its mineral-rich southeastern region through the Venezuela Corporation of Guayana (CVG), with guidance from MIT and Harvard’s Joint Center for Urban Studies. This initiative blended development theory with extractivist planning, seeking to integrate nature into society via large-scale geo-engineering and managerial systems. Gianfranco Selgas explores how planners rendered Guayana both a material and symbolic object of knowledge – through infrastructure, maps, reports, and images, arguing that these technical and discursive processes constituted a radical 'socialization of nature', reshaping the region’s environment under the imperatives of capital and modernisation.
More information
About the speakers
Pragya Agarwal is a British-Indian writer and academic. She is currently a visiting professor of social inequities and injustice at Loughborough University and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her widely acclaimed non-fiction books include Sway, Hysterical and (M)otherhood, and she has written for publications including The Guardian, Scientific American and Times Literary Supplement. She has been awarded the Transmission Prize for 'making complex scientific ideas accessible' and the Crucible NESTA award for 'innovative inter-disciplinary work'. She was a 2023 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow at the British Library.
Gianfranco Selgas is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL. His research examines the cultural, media, and political ecology of extractivism and energy across Latin America and the Caribbean, drawing on critical theory, environmental history, and political ecology. He is an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Energy Ethics (University of St Andrews). He is a 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow at the British Library.
About the Eccles Institute
The Eccles Institute builds, curates and preserves the Americas and Oceania contemporary collection at the Library and champions knowledge and understanding of these regions through a rich programme of fellowships and awards, cultural events, research training, guides to the collections and initiatives for schools.
For more information about the Institute and our collections, contact eccles-institute@bl.uk or visit our blog.
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