Biography
Dani Inkpen is an environmental historian of science who specializes in mountain regions. She has written a monograph on the history of repeat glacier photography: Capturing Glaciers: A history of repeat glacier photography and global warming (University of Washington Press, 2024). She has worked on interdisciplinary knowledge co-creation with Indigenous Peoples in major assessment initiatives: The Canadian Mountain Assessment (University of Calgary Press, 2023). Currently, she is working on a history of searches for the yeti that tells the story as one of garbled knowledge production resulting from unequal and dynamic social-epistemic relations between foreign mountaineers and Himalayans. She teaches courses on the histories of science and technology, environmental history, the social production of ignorance, historiography, and American history. Before coming to 91鶹she taught at Cape Breton University, New York University, and King’s College University.
Publications
Capturing Glaciers: A History of Repeat Photography and Global Warming (University of Washington Press, 2024).
“Mountains as Homelands,” (University of Calgary Press, 2023), co-lead with Megan Dicker Nuchasak.
Editor. De Arruda, et al. Dedicated to Nature: Celebrating 50 Years of the Chignecto Naturalists Club
"Iconography of Ice: The history and politics of glacier photography," Natural History 132, no. 2
"Capturing Glaciers: A history of repeat glacier photography and global warming," NiCHE blog post. 22 February [online]
“The Human-Nature Distinction,” Integrative Conservation Clinic (Fall 2023), co-authored with Drew Inkpen.
"Of Ice and Men: The evolving role of the camera in twentieth-century glaciology," Environmental History 27, no. 3 (2022)
"Ever Higher: The mountain cryosphere," in Ice Humanities, edited by Klaus Dodds & Sverker Sorlin (University of Manchester Press, 2022)
"The Scientific Life in the Alpine: Recreation and Moral Life in the Field," Isis 109, no. 3 (2018)
"On the Subject of Goethe: Hermann von Helmholtz on Goethe and Scientific Objectivity," Spontaneous Generations 3, no. 1 (2009)
Tracings: The art of Charlie Young, Canadian Alpine Journal (2019)
“Tom Bombadil and the Spirit of Objectivity,” Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles William, and Mythopoeic Literature 39, no. 1 (2020): 117-131.
Education
Harvard University (PhD)
University of British Columbia (MA)
University of British Columbia (BA)
Teaching
Writing History (Historiography)
History of Technology
Histories of Ignorance
American History after 1862 (Freedom & Empire)
Topics in Environmental History
Introduction to Environmental History
Knowing the World: Introduction to the History of Science
Research
Dani studies how knowledge of place is generated through practices and ideas. She's particularly interested in how the practices of science, exploration, and recreation intersect to generate ideas about what mountains are and who and what they are "for."
Her current research project is a history of searches for the yeti that seeks to understand the well-known Yeti-as-fuzzy-white-abominable-snowman as a product of transcultural knowledge encounters on Himalayan mountaineering expeditions.
Recordings
“,” on Time to Eat the Dogs, a Podcast about Science, History, and Exploration, Dec. 10, 2018.
at launch of Canadian Mountain Assessment, November 4, 2023 at Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.
Grants, awards & honours
2020 Ritter Memorial Fellow, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.