Brendan Whyte has taken up the role of Curator and Head of the Map Collection at the University of Chicago, a position last held by Chris Winters, who retired in 2016. A New Zealander long interested in anomalous borders, Brendan received a PhD in political geography from the University of Melbourne in 2002, for his thesis analyzing and mapping the long-standing boundary dispute (subsequently resolved in 2016) between India and Bangladesh over the 200-odd enclaves that existed for several centuries along the border of the princely state of Cooch Behar. He served as Assistant Map Curator at the University of Melbourne 2003-2005, and Assistant (later Acting) Curator of Maps at the National Library of Australia 2009-2020 then after that Library’s corporate restructure, as Coordinator of Special Collection Retrieval and Delivery 2020-2025. He was editor of The Globe, journal of the Australian and New Zealand Map Society 2009-2024, and recently joined the editorial board of the Journal of Map and Geography Libraries. He has contributed to the maps-l email list for a quarter of a century, and attended the WAML conference in Hawaii in 2012. His other interests include designing and playing board games (especially ones using maps as the board), his most recent design being a solitaire strategic Napoleonic wargame Reves de Gloire (Strategy and Tactics, 350, Jan-Feb 2025).
Contact bwhyte@uchicago.edu ph. (773) 702 9181
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