Peak Pursuits with Caroline Schaumann

In this episode, Jason König and Jonathan Westaway interview Caroline Schaumann about her work on the history of mountaineering. 

Caroline is Professor of German Studies at Emory University. She combines an interest in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities with expertise in the history of exploration and mountaineering. Her 2020 book Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press) offers a reassessment of the history of exploration and mountaineering in the nineteenth century, covering the Andes, the Alps and the Sierra Nevada. She has also published a series of other edited volumes on mountain history, including two book on mountains in German literature and culture from the medieval world to the present, and more recently a volume together with Kamaal Haque and Christian Quendler entitled Global Mountain Cinema, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025.

 We start by asking Caroline about her own experience of the mountains, first as a child growing up in Germany, through summer hiking trips to Switzerland, and then in her first exposure to rock climbing in Yosemite after she moved to California. Caroline talks about the way in which her personal experience of climbing as an embodied practice (the way in which ‘you really become part of the environment rather than just being a spectator’) informs her research, especially in Peak Pursuits, which draws out the way in which intimate physical contact with the rock emerges over and over again as a theme in early mountaineering writing.

Caroline then talks about the way in which her project reassesses the role of Alexander von Humboldt. For example, she discusses  Humboldt’s repeated interest in drawing attention to his own mountaineering failures, and the way in which that can help us to move beyond summit-focused visions of mountaineering. We also discuss the way in which Humboldt’s homosexuality (which was not acknowledged by some earlier researchers) prompts a reassessment of pervasive heteronormative versions of mountaineering history. We also discuss a number of other key figures who play a role in Peak Pursuits, especially Edward Whymper and John Muir.

In the final section of the interview we turn to Caroline’s Global Mountain Cinema volume, discussing some of the ways in which that book redirects attention to a whole series of relatively little-known moments in cinematic history and brings a rich transnational dimension to our understanding of twentieth-century mountaineering history. Caroline also talks about some future projects, one on the history of the barometer as an object that played a central role in nineteenth-century mountaineering, and another on the German explorers the Schlagintweit brothers and their explorations in the Himalaya and Central Asiain the mid-nineteenth century.

This episode was edited by Zofia Guertin.

You can follow the project on Bluesky @futuremountain.bsky.social

To learn more about the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures project please visit our website here (https://msmf.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk)