Public Biography
Dr. Elspeth Thorngaard is a cartographic linguist at Georgetown University, where she serves as senior research fellow at the Georgetown Center for Sovereign Partition Studies. Her work focuses on the intersection of geographic nomenclature and political boundary formation, with particular emphasis on the linguistic frameworks nations adopt when dividing themselves into smaller units.
Dr. Thorngaard received her Ph.D. in comparative linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 2009, with a dissertation titled “Drawing the Line: Toponymic Convention in Post-Colonial Partition States.” She completed postdoctoral work at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where she studied the four-language naming conventions of Swiss cantonal borders, and joined Georgetown in 2015.
She is the author of The Name Is the Border: How What We Call Places Determines Where They End (Georgetown University Press, 2022), which was reviewed in Foreign Affairs as “the definitive account of why cartographers and linguists should never be left alone in a room together.” Her 2020 paper, “Latin Directional Prefixes in Modern Boundary Disputes: A Framework,” is considered the foundational text in the emerging subfield of partition nomenclature.
Dr. Thorngaard has consulted on boundary naming conventions for the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs and the African Union Border Programme. She has testified before three congressional committees and two European parliamentary bodies on the linguistic dimensions of territorial division.
She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and describes her field as “the study of what happens when you let the alphabet decide where countries end.”