
Dr Kat Hill
Environmental Humanities Fellow, May-August 2023
Home institution: Birkbeck College, University London
Dr Hill is a senior lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University London and has particular interests in cultural, material and religious histories of movement, environment, place and belonging. This has ranged from thinking about religious radicalism in the early modern world to global Mennonite migrations from the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries. Her current work is an interdisciplinary examination of the history and culture of bothies and mountain shelters in conversation with current debates about environmentalism, rewilding, land use and sustainability. Dr Hill’s work has been supported by grants and awards from the British Academy, the AHRC and the Leverhulme, including a Leverhulme Leadership Award. Her publications include the prize-winning book Baptism, Brotherhood and Belief (OUP 2015) and articles in numerous journals including Past and Present and German History. Recently she published a piece in Arcadia entitled ‘Golden Grains: Environmental Implications of Mennonite Migration to Kansas in the Late Nineteenth Century’ and is working on a forthcoming book called Simple Shelter on the history and contemporary culture of mountain bothies.
Project title: Simple Shelter: Bothies, Environmentalism and Communities of Place
Simple Shelter examines the significance of bothies and the communities they create, in conversation with environmental challenges our contemporary world faces. Through case studies of fifteen bothies this project thinks through responses to environmental change, calls for sustainable living, and debates over land use. Bothies are at the heart of a culture of hiking, storytelling, environmentalism, and wilderness, a culture sitting at intersecting tensions in the modern world. This project does not idealise bothy culture but seeks to ‘trouble’ the bothy as a way of asking important questions about entangled human and beyond-human worlds. Does engaging in activities like bothy-hopping promote a community that is connected to the environment? Who is included in this community, who might be excluded? Are they a form of sustainable tourism? I will focus on traditional MBA bothies but also examine how the idea of the bothy has become intertwined with ecotourism, luxury off-the-grid living and creative communities of activists.