In this short documentary you will meet three professors from the University of St Andrews in the Schools of Classics and Modern Languages who share their insights on the role of mountains in history and literature, the threats these landscapes face and how to preserve their cultural heritage. It was a privilege to speak with them and to glimpse the depth of their years of research.
We are pleased to share that this documentary was a joint winner of the Leafies contest at the St Andrews Green Film Festival 2025, an initiative showcasing original, student-produced short films on environmental themes.
Who are they?
Dr Damiano Benvegnù
Reader in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews, Dr Damiano Benvegnù explores the meeting point of literature, language, and the environment. He holds doctorates from La Sapienza University in Rome and from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA. Before joining St Andrews, he taught at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. His publications include Waste and Discard in Italy and the Mediterranean (2024) and the current book project – The Fascist Forest. Mussolini’s Trees and the Ecological Legacy of Fascism. In our film he speaks of mountains as living archives—places where memory, ecology, and culture are inseparable.
Dr Jason König
Professor of Greek at St Andrews, Jason König explores how people have imagined mountains from antiquity to the present. A graduate of Oxford and Cambridge, he has led the School of Classics and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His acclaimed book The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture (Princeton University Press, 2022; shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize 2022) and the edited volume Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2021) show how summits have inspired awe and creativity for millennia. He is now leading the research project ‘Mountains of Greece’, which examines the cultural life of Greek mountains across time, adding fresh perspectives on how these landscapes continue to shape identity and tradition.
Dr Ralph Anderson
Dr Ralph Anderson is Lecturer in Ancient History in the School of Classics at the University of St Andrews. His research centres on the religion, ritual practice, and divination of classical Athens, exploring how the Greeks sought guidance from the gods in civic and military life. He earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge and has published influential studies such as “Work with the God: Military Divination and Rational Battle-Planning in Xenophon” (2021) and “A Story of Blood, Guts and Guesswork: Synthetic Reasoning in Classical Greek Divination” (2017). In our documentary he reflects on mountains as places of ceremony and encounter, where human imagination meets both the divine and the natural world.
