Dr Nicola Whyte

Nicola Whyte is Associate Professor of History and Environmental Humanities, and is internationally known for her work on pre-modern histories of landscape, environment and society. She has extensive experience of archival research and developing interdisciplinary methods and approaches that work against the grain of traditional narrative and epistemological frameworks, to show how through history new imaginaries for the future are possible. She has made a recognised contribution to History by engaging interdisciplinary landscape and environmental humanities approaches to the historical record and challenging conventional understanding. Her original and innovative work on the early modern period bridges landscape studies and early modern social history. She has published work exploring: the interacting processes of custom, place, memory and identity in early modern communities; landscapes as embodied experience; and contemporary interpretions, appropriations and re-uses of the physical remains of the past.

 

She has collaborated on a number of externally and internally funded projects and has collaborated on large consortium grants with a strong emphasis on industry and public engagement: Stories of Change: The Past, Present and Future of Energy (AHRC PI Joe Smith); and The Past in its Place (ERC PI Philip Schwyzer). She has an extensive track record of publishing single-and co-authored outputs, frequently working with others outside her discipline (with Krause and Garde-Hansen ‘Flood Memories’ , 2012; with Joe Smith et al ‘Gathering around Stories’, 2017;  with Goodbody ‘Pandaemonium’ 2019; and with artist Henrietta Simson ‘Vertical Horizons’ (forthcoming AMPS 2025) to provide innovative contributions to historical knowledge beyond History.

 

She recently designed and in 2023 launched the first UK Environmental Humanities degree programme, which she now teaches with her colleagues in HaSS-Cornwall. In her teaching she brings her interdisciplinary methods and approaches that are urgently needed for thinking with and beyond the multiple crises of the Anthropocene. She is co-Director of the Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities. For further information including publications and events see http://www.exeter.ac.uk/esi/research/centreforenvironmentalartsandhumanities/, and Earth Humanities Global Network https://www.earthhumanities.com/, and other related projects including: Time and Tide (with Perranzabuloe Museum, Perranporth) https://news-archive.exeter.ac.uk/cornwall/2018/articles/worktohighlightperranport.html. 

She would be pleased to supervise anyone wishing to research environmental humanities theories and approaches, particularly in relation to the past. She also welcomes interest in the social, landscape and environmental history of the early modern and post-medieval period, including landscape and memory, and the uses of the past in the past, enclosure, customary law, conflict and popular protest, landscape and ecological change, boundaries and boundedness, farming practices, early industry and interactions with the sea.