About

Dr Holly Marriott Webb is a scholar of human-animal and human-nature relations.

An anthropologist and historian by training, I wrote my PhD thesis on red deer and deer hunters in the Scottish Highlands. My 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. I take a historical view on these crises, reaching back to nineteenth-century histories of empire, industrialisation and ideas of nature to understand their contemporary manifestations. My 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.

I grew up in Wiltshire, England, before heading across the downs to Oxford for my BA degree. After a brief stint in London, I moved to Uppsala, Sweden for my MA and then Aarhus, Denmark for my PhD. This was followed by an academic year teaching anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. I have now begun a 3-year postdoctoral position as a Research Fellow in Geography at Trinity College Dublin, working on a project about urban nature.