Dr Verity Burke
- School: School of English, Drama and Film
- Mentors: Prof John Brannigan and Prof Tasman Crowe
Research Fellowship: John Pollard Newman Fellowship in Climate Change and the Arts
My research expertise sits at the intersections of literary analysis, the environmental humanities, and museum studies. Since 2018, I have researched the stories we tell through the display cultures of our natural history museums, including as Principal Investigator on Still Lives: Organic and Digital Animals in the Natural History Museum (IRC, Trinity College Dublin), and as research associate on Narrativising Dinosaurs: Science and Popular Culture, 1850-Present (AHRC, University of Birmingham) and Beyond Dodos and Dinosaurs: Displaying Extinction and Recovery in Museums (NFR, Universitet i Stavanger).
My current research seeks to develop our understanding of the meaningful impact that heritage and the humanities can have on climate change. Environmental communication has been recognised across many high-level policies and strategies as an important part of enacting change, and both policy and research have found that museums are almost uniquely positioned as sites not just for communication but for climate action. Yet climate empowerment is not created solely by presenting the science: the arts have a vital role in communicating climate issues. In the Newman Fellowship for Climate Change and the Arts, I will analyse contemporary museum exhibitions of climate change, and create interventions which bring the humanities, sciences and heritage contexts of climate change into deeper communication.
Additional information:
RMS profile: (opens in a new window)https://ucd.academia.edu/VerityBurke
Twitter/X: (opens in a new window)https://twitter.com/DrVerityBurke
Contact details:
Email: (opens in a new window)verity.burke@ucdconnect.ie