Dr Jonathan Westaway

Jonathan Westaway’s research focuses on the histories of mountaineering, mountain environments and exploration and is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from cultural geography and anthropology and involves working in collaboration with archivists, curators, artists, festivals and communities. His recent research examines: British imperial leisure cultures, knowledge practices and mountain environments in India and Central Asia c.1850-1947 and their representation in travel writing, photography and film; the colonial encounter with indigenous people and culture in the circumpolar Arctic and the circulation of artefacts, people and ideas around the North Atlantic world. Westaway’s 2014 paper, ‘That Undisclosed World: Eric Shipton’s Mountains of Tartary (1950)’ in the journal Studies in Travel Writing, explored the problematic nature of travel writing authored by servants of the British Imperial security state, calling into question the reliability of these texts as sources.

This research was presented as a public lecture at the Kendal Mountain Festival 2014. Further research examining the mountaineer Eric Shipton’s relations with the Government of India reached a global mountaineering audience in 2017 via the publication of the article ‘Eric Shipton’s Secret History’ in The Alpine Journal. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Westaway has been researching and interpreting amateur and expeditionary film held in the RGS-IBG collections, which have recently been digitized by the British Film Institute. He delivered a public lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London in November 2017 entitled Sir Clarmont Percival Skrine: Filming in Central Asia, part of the RGS-IBG ‘Be inspired’ lecture series.

In 2018, Westaway curated an exhibition of recently discovered photographs from the German Kanchenjunga Expedition of 1929, in conjunction with the renowned landscape artist Julian Cooper. The exhibition, Kanchenjunga 1929, was held at the Heaton Cooper Gallery in Grasmere in the Lake District, part of the Kendal Mountain Festival 2018 programme.

The photographs on display provided an insight into post-war German mountaineering in the Himalaya and demonstrated a strong ethnographic focus, opening a unique window into the hidden histories of indigenous high-altitude expeditionary labour. Westaway is currently establishing a research network entitled Other Everests? Commemoration, Memory and Meaning and the Everest Expedition Centenaries, 2021--2024. This network will work with the mountaineering community and significant mountaineering archives and collections, to reinterpret and contextualize the post-War Everest expeditions, bringing to bear recent scholarship in this area, in preparation for the Everest expedition centenaries in 2021, 2022, and 2024.

As part of the network, Westaway has convened a panel at the RGS-IBG 2020 Conference entitled ‘Everest as a space of exception: globalization, bordering and adventure’. Colonial science and the imperial encounter with alterity informs Westaway’s other recent research in the early-modern period examining Inuit encounter stories from Orkney in the 1690s and early 1700s.

These stories emerged as part of an attempt to compile a Scottish national geography undertaken by Fellows of the Royal Society and forms part of Westaway’s wider research interest in circumpolar histories and cultural constructions of ‘the idea of north’. EXHIBITION Mountain of Destiny: Kanchenjunga 1929 Heaton Cooper Studio, Grasmere, Cumbria, 15 November-31 December 2019.  ‘Rituals of Extinction: Manhunting Games in the British Outdoor Movement, 1890-1914’, Part of the Rethinking the Rural seminar hosted by InCertainPlaces, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK, 2015.