Joan Boothe

Joan N. Boothe is an Antarctic historian who has been studying, reading, and writing Antarctic history for nearly 30 years. During her multiple trips to the Antarctic, she has seen and experienced many of the places where the events she writes about have happened. She has taught a course on the Antarctic Heroic Age for the Stanford Continuing Studies program and five courses for the Fromm Institute in San Francisco as well as lecturing on Antarctic history on Antarctic tourist trips. Her critically acclaimed book, The Storied Ice: Adventure, Exploration, and Discovery in the Antarctic Peninsula Region, originally published in 2011, has recently been translated into Chinese and published in China. A member of the Explorers Club since 2007, Ms. Boothe is a past Chair of the Northern California Chapter and has been Secretary of the Antarctican Society since 2014.

Until she went to Antarctica in 1995, Joan Boothe’s career had been entirely in the worlds of Economics, Finance, and Business Management. That changed radically when she returned from her first trip to Antarctica, realizing how little she knew about the history of the wondrous place she had just visited. And so she began searching out and collecting Antarctic books, reading, reading, researching, and taking notes. The end result, after many years, was the publication of her history of the Antarctic Peninsula Region, The Storied Ice: Adventure, Exploration, and Discovery in the Antarctic Peninsula Region. Her talk will cover how her interest in Antarctica developed into a consuming passion that changed her life, came to write her book, and how the topic of her book — the history of the most-visited region of this vast part of the Earth — fits into the overall history of Antarctica.