An Interview with Meghan Kelly, LMEC Designer-in-Residence

In June 2025, Meghan Kelly will join the Leventhal Center as this year’s Designer-in-Residence. Meghan is a cartographer and an associate professor in the Geography and the Environment Department at Syracuse University. Her work draws on feminist practice and challenges our conventional understandings of space and place using new forms of visualization.

We sat down with Meghan to learn more about how she became a geographer, how she thinks about critical cartography, and her upcoming residency at the Center.

Read the interview → 

Boston Globe on People’s Maps

The Leventhal Center was recently mentioned in Boston Globe columnist Renée Loth’s article “For Greater Boston, a different kind of freedom trail,” which focuses on the book A People’s Guide to Greater Boston and the power of community-focused “counter-mapping.” In the article, LMEC President & Head Curator Garrett Dash Nelson notes, “One of our goals in bringing maps like this into our collections is to encourage people to see maps not just as something done to them and their communities.” One of the maps from the book, A people’s map of Lawrence, Massachusetts, is available in the LMEC collection, along with other examples of “counter-maps.”

Read the full article → 

Map Chat: Copying Maps in Early Modern East Asia

In the newest publication from the MacLean Collection–Leventhal Center Map Chat series, Dr. Mario Cams investigates how studying one particular copy of an eighteenth-century map of the Ming Empire can open up a genealogy of printed maps. In his dissection and analysis of the map, Cams argues that this map demonstrates a history of print culture that sheds light on how East Asian mapmakers recombined and copied features from older objects, crossing time and space through Ming China, Qing China, and Edo Japan.

Read the full article → 

A Back Catalog of LMEC Digital Exhibitions

Interested in maps, but not able to make the trip to the Central Library to see our gallery? Looking for a virtual museum experience for students?

Our digital collections portal includes links to our previous exhibits, which date back more than two decades! The Leventhal Center has over thirty exhibitions available digitally to the public. These digital exhibitions contain objects and captions from each show, high-resolution imagery, and complete bibliographies.

See past exhibitions → 

Newsletter Trivia: The North Shore

This North Shore Massachusetts town was the Bay Colony’s first and primary fishing port and is still known for its close ties to maritime culture today. What town is this?

• Salem
• Rockport
• Marblehead
• Gloucester

The answer to last newsletter’s question about which industry was historically present on the site of the current Gillette campus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a Sugar Refinery.

Correct answers will be included in a random draw—the winner will receive the next three Map of the Month club postcards for free. Congratulations to our last winner, Steven! In order to enter, make sure you follow us on Bluesky, Instagram or Facebook and direct message or email us the answer to the following question. We’ll accept answers until June 2 at 9 am ET.

Message us on Instagram → 

Father’s Day Map Sale!

Father’s Day is on the way and the Leventhal Center has just the right gift for Dad from our gift store! Until June 15, use the code DADS-LOVE-MAPS to get 25% off your order from the LMEC gift store. For delivery by Father’s Day, please place your order by June 5.

Whether you’re looking for an amusing old map of Boston, a beautiful view of Cape Cod, or a striking pre-Revolution map from our current exhibition, our high quality prints are the perfect way to celebrate the map lover in your life. Get Dad a gift he’ll cherish and help support LMEC along the way.

Visit the gift store →