Dr. Holly Marriott Webb

Biography

Holly Marriott Webb is a scholar of human-animal and human-nature relations. An anthropologist and historian by training, she wrote her PhD thesis on red deer and deer hunters in the Scottish Highlands. Her overarching research interest is in understanding how local human-animal cultures in the British Isles are entangled in, adapting to, and shaped by the global environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. She takes a historical view on these crises, reaching back to nineteenth-century histories of empire, industrialisation and ideas of nature to understand their contemporary manifestations. Dr. Marriott Webb's more disciplinary research interest is in pushing the boundaries of what scholars in the humanities can say about animal lives, developing interdisciplinary methods for understanding local animal cultures and histories. At Trinity College, Holly is exploring urban nature in Dublin, working with Prof. Anna Davies and Prof. Iris Moeller on the NATURESCAPES project (www.naturescapes-project.com). She is conducting a fieldwork study on the use of nature-based solutions in Dublin, seeking to understand how councils, companies and community groups are using nature to achieve social and environmental goals. She is particularly interested in how imaginaries of nature shape people's approach to managing, enhancing, using and caring for nature in the city.