Denis Wood

Denis Wood is an artist, author, cartographer and a former professor of Design at North Carolina State University. Born in 1945, Wood grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, receiving a BA in English (in 1967) from then Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University). He received an MA (in 1971) and a PhD (in 1973) in geography from Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Wood taught environmental psychology, landscape history, and design in then School of Design (now College of Design) at North Carolina State University from 1974 through 1996, living and raising his family in Boylan Heights. Beginning in 1996, Wood spent over two years in prison on a conviction for molesting a teenage boy.

His book The Power of Maps (1992) was considered radical when it was published.The Power of Maps has been a linchpin of the “new cartographies” in which maps are redefined as socially constructed arguments based upon consistent semiotic codes.

Wood’s consistent critique “of the ideals of modern academic cartographers and of modern cartographic ideology” has been wide ranging, informed, and decisive. In 2004, John Pickles, Early N. Phillips Distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina summed up Wood’s contributions this way: “For over twenty-five years, Denis Wood has been provoking us to think differently and critically about maps and map use.” The book was first issued in 1992 as a catalogue accompanying a major exhibition called The Power of Maps at the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design in New York. That show was later remounted at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1994. These exhibitions were the graphic genesis of the 1992 book which has been the subject of both scholarly commentary and popular interest.

...
Wikipedia