John Wyatt Greenlee
John Wyatt Greenlee is a medievalist and a cartographic historian, as well as a historian of roads and pathways and pilgrimage. But he is best well known for my work on the role of eels in pre-modern England from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. He is heavily engaged in outreach and public engagement to make the eel history more widely known, and to raise awareness for the role of eels as an endangered species. His work with eels and eel history has been profiled in TIME, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, Hakai Magazine, and The New Yorker (click here for a full list of earned media)
He has kept up the public outreach part of his work, though, and he continues to write and talk about eels and eel history. He is (mostly) no longer an academic, however. The collapse of the academic job market and the advent of COVID just as he completed his PhD saw to that. That saddens him; he believes we are at a point in time when we are badly in need of trained and thoughtful historians.
While not in the academy, though, he has taken many of my academic interests and channelled them into a business drawing custom maps on commission: Surprised Eel Mapping. He works primarily with academic historians to provide them with clean, clear maps for their monographs, book chapters, and articles. But he also draws maps for games and decoration, as well. There is more information at the website linked below, including examples of his work and information about pricing and process.
