Susan Schulten

Susan Schulten is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Denver, where she has taught since 1996. Schulten has long been interested in historical maps as rich artifacts in our shared history. At AAS, she is particularly interested in the rich collections around early national female education, where map drawing became essential to the curriculum. As the growth of printing facilitated the spread of maps in American life, they took on new familiarity and importance. One aspect of this was the growing use of maps as political weapons, particularly in the sectional crisis of the 1850s.

Schulten is the author of several books, including A History of America in 100 Maps (2018), which examines how maps can reveal new angles on our past, and Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (2012), which explores how maps transformed American life by organizing information. Her most recent work, Emma Willard: Maps of History (2022), examines one of the nineteenth-century’s most influential educators whose inventive chronological maps and graphics helped millions of Americans understand time in new ways. 

Her work has been funded by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Schulten teaches courses on Civil War and Reconstruction, America at the turn of the century, the history of American ideas and culture, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Great Depression, the Cold War, war and the presidency, and the methods and philosophy of history. She also serves as history editor for the longform history podcast, “Lost Highways.” In 2025-2026 she will serve as the State Historian of Colorado.