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In 1937, a pictorial fine art map of the University of Toronto was designed and painted by artist Alexander Scott Carter. The map was commissioned by Vincent Massey, then High Commissioner for Canada in Britain, and given as a gift to Hart House. As a vibrantly visual rendition of the university's historical lineage, the map depicts the evolution of the university's various colleges along with its founders, contemporary geographical boundaries, and lush and verdant landscapes. The purpose of this paper is to inquire into its cultural and historical importance.

The paper analyses, and provides a viewpoint on, A. Scott Carter's map.

Carter's map reveals the discursive and visual interpretive frameworks in which the map was situated and the narratives and myths that it sanctioned. The map performs an important function in authorizing the collective identity of the university and its actual and imagined communities. It provides a cultural expression of shared values, ideals, and particular historical traditions. The university's place in the hierarchy and tradition of Canadian higher education in the British Commonwealth is embodied in the map at a time when such ideas were under scrutiny by professors and intellectuals who were arguing for the extrication of Canada from colonial inheritances.

Carter's map highlights the university and its integral cultural artifacts, spaces, and practices as being replete with contested meanings, experiences, and symbolism. Through dynamic cartography, new approaches in deciphering the official and informal campus emerge to produce a nuanced and multifaceted historical picture of university and academic cultures.

The purpose of this paper is to: introduce the topic of the relationship between universities and the First World War historiographically; put university expertise and knowledge at the centre of studies of the First World War; and explain how an examination of university expertise and war reveals a continuity of intellectual and scientific activity from war to peace.

Placing the papers in the special issue of HER on universities and war in the context of a broader historiography of the First World War and its aftermath.

The interconnections between university expertise and the First World War is a neglected field, yet its examination enriches the current historiography and prompts us to see the war not simply in terms of guns and battles but also how the battlefield extended university expertise with long-lasting implications into the 1920s and 1930s.

The paper explores how universities and their expertise – e.g. medical, artistic, philosophical – were mobilised in the First World War and the following peace.