Rethinking Geographical Explorations in Extreme Environments

Marco Armiero is Research Director at the Institute for the Study of Mediterranean Societies at the Italian National Research Council in Naples, Italy, and Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Since 2019, he has been the President of the European Society for Environmental History. Roberta Biasillo is Assistant Professor of contemporary political history at the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and visiting Max Weber Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Stefano Morosini is Adjunct Professor of environmental history at the University of Bergamo, Italy, and is Senior Associate at the Centre for the History of the Alps (LabiSAlp)–Italian-Swiss University in Mendrisio. He is also the scientific coordinator of the Heritage projects at the Stelvio National Park, Italy.

Introduction: A world that is losing its margins 1. Emotions and Mountaineering for Internationalist Purposes: The case of the Union Internationale des Associations d’Alpinisme (UIAA), 1939-1951 2. Power, politics and exploration in fascist Italy: The 1928 watershed 3. Roald Amundsen vs Umberto Nobile: The role of the newspapers in the age of nationalism and polar imperialism 4. Umberto Nobile between two totalitarianisms 5. Imperialist Italian geography currents in the work of Roberto Almagià and his ambiguous relationship with the fascist regime 6. Walter Wood and the Legacies of Science and Alpinism in the St Elias Mountains 7. Physiology and biomedicine on high-altitude expeditions (c.1880-1980) 8. Italian geographers, scientists, travellers and mountaineers in the Karakoram (1890-1954) 9. Commercialization and Mount Everest in the Twentieth Century Conclusions: Geographical exploration via the environmental humanities: Decolonising approaches to space