Minds on Mountains conference held at MSU
Local, national, and international experts will be featured presenting their mountain-oriented research
Photo by Jimmy Chin
Bozeman resident and esteemed mountaineer Conrad Anker is one of several experts who will be featured at MSU’s second annual Minds on Mountains conference April 25 and 26.
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MSU News Service
BOZEMAN — Prominent voices from the mountaineering realm will keynote the second annual Minds on Mountains Conference sponsored by Montana State University’s College of Letters and Science on April 25–26.
The event, which is organized by the Mountains Working Group in MSU’s Department of History and Philosophy, also will feature two dozen faculty and graduate student speakers from six MSU departments, as well as representatives from the Montana Historical Society and local climbing community. They will present their mountain-oriented research in fields ranging from the arts and humanities to the social and natural sciences.
“We thought we should get a conference together that focuses on all MSU departments that work on mountain topics,” said professor and historian of science Michael Reidy, head of MSU’s history and philosophy department and adviser of the Minds on Mountains Working Group. “From the beginning, this conference is intended to be interdisciplinary between colleges and across the university.”
A series of talks and roundtable discussions on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics will be presented during the first session of the conference from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday, April 25, in Norm Asbjornson Hall’s Inspiration Hall.
At 1 p.m. Thursday, students will present “Victorian Mountains” posters as part of MSU’s Student Research Celebration in the Strand Union Ballrooms.
The conference continues at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Bozeman Public Library, 626 E. Main St., with a keynote address, “Getting into Mountains: A History of Guiding and the Challenges of Access,” by Annie Coleman, associate professor at the University of Notre Dame, whose research focuses on the cultural and environmental history of outdoor sports and recreation.
On Friday, April 26, talks and roundtable discussions will continue from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Inspiration Hall. Tanka Prasad Paudel, visiting from the Nepal Mountain Academy in Kathmandu, will give a special lunch presentation on “The Nepal Mountain Academy, Montana State, and the Future of Climbing Education,” from noon to 1 p.m.
The conference will conclude Friday in Inspiration Hall with a 5 p.m. presentation by esteemed mountaineer Conrad Anker and Katie Ives, former editor of Alpinist magazine and author of “Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams.”
Reidy said the Minds on Mountains conference was inspired by the triennial Thinking Mountains Interdisciplinary Summits, which were sponsored by the University of Alberta until they ended in 2018. The aim is to expand the Mountain Studies Working Group at MSU and grow this conference’s prominence and gather scholars from natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities to promote dialogue about mountain places, peoples and activities around the world, he said.
All Minds on Mountains events are free and open to the public. For more information or to view a complete schedule, visit www.mindsonmountains/org.
