Toby is an associate professor at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s national academy of sciences. He specialises in Mediterranean history and studies northwest Africa in European cartography. He authored Family and Empire: The Fernández de Córdoba and the Spanish Realm and has co-edited three collections of essays. Liang has (co-)founded the Spain-North Africa Project, The Medieval Globe, and other academic organisations. He has lived in Taiwan, Syria, Spain and the USA.

Where was Northwest Africa in the Age of Exploration?

Northwest Africa is absent in scholarship on the Age of Exploration. My project restores the area’s role as an intermediary between Europe, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. By analysing maps and texts from the 14th to 18th centuries, I am investigating how conceptualizations of northwest Africa were dis:connective. The phenomenon of blank space, adjacent to absence, silence and erasure, looms large, and I am developing a methodology to understand blanks, particularly how they shaped epistemological developments in European encounters with the world and ‘Others’.