Stewart Weaver, professor of history at the University of Rochester, will describe the place of the Himalaya in the British imagination when he speaks at 5 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 27, in the Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library on the University’s River Campus.
His talk, titled “Because It Was There: Mallory, Everest, and the 1920s,” is drawn from Weaver’s teaching and research interests in modern British history and British imperial history. Photographs from the 1920s and from Weaver’s recent travels in India and Nepal will complement this latest lecture in the continuing Neilly Series, which is free and open to the public.
British interest in the region dates from the 1700s. It was a British survey team that first recognized Mt. Everest as the highest point on earth in 1852, and the British climber George Leigh Mallory died trying to reach the summit in 1924, one of the many famous attempts—and later successes—that add to the mystique of the Himalaya.
Ernestine McHugh, the author of Love and Honor in the Himalayas: Coming To Know Another Culture (2001) and associate professor of anthropology and religion in the Humanities Department at the Eastman School of Music, will introduce Weaver. He and Maurice Isserman, professor of history at Hamilton College, are at work on a new history of mountaineering, with a working title of The Conquest of the Himalaya: From the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes.
The yearlong Neilly Series is supported by the Andrew H. Neilly and Janet Dayton Neilly Endowment, and the River Campus Libraries. For more information, contact (585) 275-4461.
Note to editors: A jpeg image of Stewart Weaver can be e-mailed to you. Please call (585) 275-4128 or send your request to sdickman@rochester.edu.