Mountain humanities project

We are excited to announce the launch of our new project ‘Mountain stories, mountain futures: exploring new directions for the Mountain Humanities’, funded by the British Academy-Leverhulme Small Grants scheme (August 2026-July 2028) (Co-investigators: Jason König, Jonathan Pitches, Jonathan Westaway).

The goal of the project is to map out some new vital and urgent pathways for arts and humanities research on the past, present and future of mountain landscapes around the world.

Academic research in the field of mountain studies is still dominated by the sciences and social sciences. There has been an expansion of arts and humanities approaches in recent years, especially in the history of mountaineering, but this work is still very disparate, and lacks a strong sense of shared questions and priorities. This is the right time to be exploring new possibilities for the discipline. At the heart of the project is the aspiration to move beyond the anthropocentric approaches that have dominated mountain research in recent decades, and to explore new opportunities for bringing academic and creative responses into dialogue with each other.

1. The first phase of the project involves a series of online work-in-progress events during 2026-27, designed to generate new dialogue between academic researchers and creative practitioners across the full geographical and chronological range of mountain arts and humanities. The call for papers for that series is included below.
2. The second phase of the project involves a collaboration with Cove Park, a writers’ and artists’ residency on the west coast of Scotland, focused around an in-person workshop in September 2027.
3. The third phase involves producing an agenda-setting journal special issue, and a series of podcasts extending the already existing ‘Mountain stories, Mountain Futures’ podcast series, in order to showcase some of the new approaches developed within the project.

Get involved

Please do get in touch if you are keen to be involved! Our project email address is [email protected], or see below for individual contact details for project’s co-investigators.

Subscribe

To subscribe for regular updates, podcast episodes, and links to the project’s online events, can click on the ‘Subscribe’ link bottom right-hand side of the project website, or email [email protected] with ‘subscribe msmf-network’ in the subject line.

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Jason König, University of St. Andrews, [email protected]

Jonathan Pitches, University of Leeds, [email protected]

Jonathan Westaway, University of Lancashire, [email protected]