Enduring Encounters: Maps of Japan from Leiden University Library

Radu Leca is Assistant Professor of theory and history of art at the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University. Radu is a historian of visual, scribal, and cartographic culture in Japan. After a BA in Japanese literature at Kanazawa University, he completed his MA and PhD in History of Art at SOAS, University of London. His doctoral thesis analysed attitudes towards the outside world, both real and imagined, in late seventeenth-century Japanese urban culture. Among forthcoming publications is "Fluttering Ambition: Heteroglossic Geographic Knowledge on a Sixteenth-Century Folding Fan", in Michael Zimmerman et al. (eds.), Dialogical Imaginations, Zuerich: Diaphanes.



Martijn Storms studied human geography and planning at Utrecht University, where he specialised in GIS and cartography. He is Curator of maps and atlases at Leiden University Libraries and Project Coordinator for Koeman's Atlantes Neerlandici at Brill publishers. Besides, he is National Representative of the Netherlands for Imago Mundi. In 2017 he organized the symposium 'Mapping Asia: Cartographic Encounters Between East and West' in Leiden, which included two exhibitions: 'Mapping Asia' at Museum Volkenkunde and 'Mapping Japan' at Japanmuseum SieboldHuis. In 2022 his book Maps That Made History. 1000 Years of World History in 100 Old Maps was published.