Dr Mark Rhodes
American Philosophical Society Fellow, September 2025 - January 2026
Home institution: Michigan Technological University
Dr. Mark Alan Rhodes II is an Associate Professor of Geography in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University. His research explores the intersections of memory, heritage, landscape, and identity, particularly through institutional relations. His work has been published in both the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. His edited volume Geographies of Post-Industrial Place, Memory, and Heritage also reflects his focus on industrial communities and heritage. At Michigan Tech, he advises MS and PhD students in the world’s leading Industrial Heritage and Archaeology program and has recently been named the editor for the North American Journal of Welsh Studies.
Project title: Writing the Nation: Literary Geographies of National Museums Scotland Publications
In 1988, two staff from National Museums of Scotland made the claim that “[m]useums probably produce a greater assortment of printed and/or published items than any other comparable institution.” Minimal research has explored the role of the national museum press in nation-building or as a literary, historical, or spatial process and object. This proposed work frames the national museum press at the intersection of museum studies and literary geographies. Narrative and archival methods will help to illustrate shifting historical and political geographies in Scotland’s nation-building from 1780 to the present. I aim to illuminate sociopolitical structures and fissures printed by Scotland’s national museums. Working with literary geographers and Scottish ethnologists at Edinburgh, I will focus my research during the course of the fellowship on deeper questions into the literary geographies of the book and the absence, presence, and curation of Scottish archives. This work, building upon my existing research on Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, will inform a framework for examining U.S. national museums and their own interlaced literary, historical, and political geographies.