Jason König
Jason is Professor of Classics at the University of St Andrews. He was Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Mountains in Ancient Literature and Culture and their Postclassical Reception’ from 2017-2023. The project produced a series of publications on the history and representation of mountains both in antiquity and beyond: e.g. his edited volume Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity, Bloomsbury 2021, and sole-authored monograph The Folds of Olympus, Princeton University Press, 2022, and a series of articles on the role of mountains in nineteenth-century travel and travel writing in Greece and the wider Mediterranean. His current work includes a project on mountain heritage in Greece, which includes a website and a conference in Athens in October 2025.
Jonathan Pitches
Jonathan is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Head of the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds in the UK. He is an influential scholar, author and editor of theatre training, digital pedagogy, and eco-criticism and the founding co-editor of the Routledge journal: Theatre, Dance and Performance Training. Heis the author of Performing Mountains (Palgrave 2020), supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Most recently he has been working on a long book chapter mapping the relationship between Scottish literature and its extensive mountain landscapes (for the Routledge Companion to Scottish Literature).
Jonathan Westaway
Jonathan is Reader in Cultural and Environmental History and Co-Director of the Institute for Area and Migration Studies, University of Lancashire, UK and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG), the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Royal Asiatic Society. He is a cultural and environmental historian/geographer. His research focusses on imperial cultures of exploration in both polar and mountain environments. His recent research has examined British imperial governance, knowledge practices and leisure cultures in Highland Asia and Central Asia c.1850–1947 and their representation in travel writing, photography and film. He was project lead on the AHRC Research Network Other Everests: Commemoration, Memory and Meaning and the British Everest Expedition Centenaries, 2021-2024 (2022-2023) and is project lead on the AHRC funded Other Everests public engagement project (2024-2025) comprising of exhibitions and public outreach events with project partners the National Trust, the RGS-IBG, the Kendal Mountain Festival and The Confluence Collective, Kalimpong, India. He has co-edited a recent collection of essays entitled Other Everest: One Mountain, Many Worlds (Manchester University Press, 2024).
Thanks also to Mary Woodcock Kroble as IT advisor, developer, and video editor for the project; and Zofia Guertin as podcast editor and advisor; also to the St Andrews School of Classics Research Committee for funding for the first phase of the project.