Professor Briony McDonagh

Professor Briony McDonagh

Interim Director of the Energy and Environment Institute & Professor of Environmental Humanities

Faculty and Department

  • Institutes
  • Energy and Environmental Institute

Summary

Briony McDonagh is (Interim) Director of the Energy & Environment Institute and Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Hull. Her disciplinary background is in historical geography and environmental history. Her current research interests lie in the green-blue humanities and her work uses place-based, creative and participatory methods to build water and climate action. She has published widely on landscape and environmental change, on histories and cultures of living with water and flood, on women’s histories, and on the historical geographies of enclosure, commons and protest.

She is Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Water Cultures, hosted by the University of Hull's Energy & Environment Institute. The Centre pioneers a new, humanities-led, interdisciplinary and transhistorical research area – the ‘green-blue humanities’ – equipping a new generation of PhD students to take this agenda forward and transform our understanding of humanity's relationships with water in the green-blue regions of the world, past, present and future.

In addition, Briony is Principal Investigator of 'Risky Cities: Living with Water in an Uncertain Future Climate', a UKRI-funded project learning from the past to build climate awareness today and for the future. Working with project partners including the National Youth Theatre, Absolutely Cultured and the Living with Water Partnership, the project develops learning histories for one flood-prone city (Kingston upon Hull, UK) and use arts and heritage interventions to engage diverse communities in building flood resilience.

Her book, Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830 (Routledge, 2017), won the Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize and Women’s History Network Book Prize. She is co-editor of Women and the Land, 1500-1900 (Boydell & Brewer, 2019), Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500 (Palgrave, 2018) and Hull: Culture, History, Place (Liverpool University Press, 2017). She is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Royal Historical Society and Higher Education Academy, and was 2018-2019 President of the British Science Association’s Geography Section.

Briony recently held a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (on 'Gendering the Early Modern Commons') and was Co-I on an AHRC/XR Stories Creative Industries project combining disciplinary and industry expertise to virtually recreate a seventeenth-century flood of Hull. She also served as Director of the University's Doctoral College 2020-2023.

Recent outputs

View more outputs

Book Chapter

Learning from arts and humanities approaches for building climate resilience in the UK

Brookes, E., McDonagh, B., Wagner, C., Ashton, J., Harvey-Fishenden, A., Kennedy-Asser, A., …Smith, K. (2023). Learning from arts and humanities approaches for building climate resilience in the UK. In S. Dessai, K. Lonsdale, J. Lowe, & R. Harcourt (Eds.), Quantifying Climate Risk and Building Resilience in the UK (75-89). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39729-5_6

Digital Artefact

Wet Feet Warm Hearts Strong Places: a community created zine about flood resilience in Hull

Smith, K., Brookes, E., McDonagh, B., Chamberlain, J., Hughes, G., & Dorton, L. (2023). Wet Feet Warm Hearts Strong Places: a community created zine about flood resilience in Hull. [pdf]

Journal Article

Living with water and flood in medieval and early modern Hull

Mcdonagh, B., Worthen, H., Mottram, S., & Buxton-Hill, S. (in press). Living with water and flood in medieval and early modern Hull. Environment and History,

Learning histories, participatory methods and creative engagement for climate resilience

McDonagh, B., Brookes, E., Smith, K., Worthen, H., Coulthard, T., Hughes, G., …Chamberlain, J. (2023). Learning histories, participatory methods and creative engagement for climate resilience. Journal of Historical Geography, 82, 91-97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2023.09.002

Women, Land and Property, Then and Now: An Afterword

McDonagh, B. (2021). Women, Land and Property, Then and Now: An Afterword. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44(4), 487-491. https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12802

Lead investigator

Project

Funder

Grant

Started

Status

Project

The University of Hull Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre on Water Cultures

Funder

The Leverhulme Trust

Grant

£1,350,000.00

Started

1 June 2021

Status

Ongoing

Project

HIKE: Risky Cities KE fellowship

Funder

AHRC Arts & Humanities Research Council

Grant

£49,540.00

Started

1 January 2024

Status

Ongoing

Project

Experiencing the landscape: popular geographical imaginations in the English Midlands, 1450-1650

Funder

British Academy

Grant

£9,968.00

Started

1 September 2014

Status

Complete

Project

Gendering the commons

Funder

The Leverhulme Trust

Grant

£55,000.00

Started

1 January 2019

Status

Complete

Project

Risky Cities: Living with water in an uncertain future climate

Funder

AHRC Arts & Humanities Research Council

Grant

£333,903.00

Started

1 August 2020

Status

Complete

Project

On the Edge: a co-created exploration of young people’s eco-anxiety in the face of climate uncertainty

Funder

NERC Natural Environment Research Council

Grant

£10,000.00

Started

1 July 2021

Status

Complete

Co-investigator

Project

Funder

Grant

Started

Status

Project

HIKE: SuDS Monitoring for Blue-Green Infrastructure

Funder

AHRC Arts & Humanities Research Council

Grant

£46,337.00

Started

1 July 2023

Status

Ongoing

Project

By the rising tide of Humber: Flooding Andrew Marvell's Hull

Funder

AHRC Arts & Humanities Research Council

Grant

£7,658.00

Started

1 October 2019

Status

Complete

Project

Hubert Nicholson: Lost and Found

Funder

SAS School of Advanced Study

Grant

£1,500.00

Started

1 June 2017

Status

Complete

Project

Arts, Heritage and Liveability: Assessing the effectiveness of community arts and heritage initiatives in Kingston Upon Hull to build urban liveability in precarious places

Funder

ESRC Economic & Social Research Council

Grant

£96,611.00

Started

1 January 2023

Status

Complete

Project

NERC: Supporting Interdisciplinarity in Discovery Science 2022

Funder

NERC Natural Environment Research Council

Grant

£14,197.00

Started

1 October 2022

Status

Complete

Project

Diversity to Decarbonise: Promoting EDI in the future workforce

Funder

EPSRC Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council

Grant

£168,790.00

Started

1 January 2023

Status

Complete

Postgraduate supervision

Briony welcomes enquiries from potential PGRs (PhD and Masters candidates) wishing to work on projects on the following themes (broadly interpreted), in the UK and beyond, in periods c. 1400 onwards (and long duree studies):

- Historical geographies of landscape and environmental change, including projects on living with water and flood; enclosure and the commons; agricultural improvement; rural and urban landscapes; global environmental histories

- Women histories and historical geographies

- The geographies of protest, resistance and the law (in both historic and contemporary contexts)

- Heritage and/or arts-based community engagement, including in relation to climate action

- Climate action and social justice, particularly place-based approaches to resilience building

Completed PhDs

- Charlotte Garside, Women in Chancery: an analysis of chancery as a women's court of redress in late 17th-century England

- Kalliopi Kaparounaki, Caring children in Malawi: children's work within families affected by illness and disability

- Sarah Shields, Maid, wife, widow: women's life-course and property ownership, 1550-1800

- Jazmin Scarlett, The development of co-volcanic societies: the reciprocal relationships between the volcano La Soufrière and the society of St. Vincent, Lesser Antilles, 1718-1979

- Lizzie Rogers, Women and the World: Explorers from the Home during the Enlightenment in Britain

- Stormm Buxton-Hill, The impact of women on family dynastic ambitions and legal change in England, 1550-1800

- Catherine Goddard, Heritage interpretation and visitor experience at historic homes in the East Midlands, with a focus on women's history

- Ruth Quinn, Agricultural heritage of Saltaire

- Helen Manning (passed subject to corrections) Women, property and the law: mapping sexual inequality in the East Riding of Yorkshire, 1708-1974

- Alice Whiteoak, Widows in the Court of Exchequer: Allowed Power and Legal Redress in England, 1620-1670

Current PhD supervisions

- Flavia Manieri, Living with Floods in 20th C Hull

- Fred Bricknell, Water, Slavery and Indentured Labour: Plantations and People in British Guiana, c.1796-1880

- Blessing Mucherera, The Cultural Production of Flood Injustices

- Luke Michno-Neville Living on the Edge: surviving and thriving in the Holocene Humberhead Levels

- Felicity Wood, English literature, water, health, and well-being in estuary communities, 1500 - 1700

- Nathalie Holloway, Creative community engagement for climate and water action: a comparative study

- Petra Codato, Transformative Shorelines: Creative Community Engagement for Cultural Adaptation in Sites Affected by Coastal Changes

- Giulia Repetti, Investigating the links between climate-related water stresses, migration and human trafficking

Awards and prizes

Winner of the Bristol-Bern Prize in Public Environmental History

2023

The Risky Cities project won the 2023 Bristol-Bern Prize in Public Environmental History for work using histories and stories of flooding and living with water to build flood resilience and climate action in the city of Hull, UK.

President for the Geography section of the British Science Association

2018 - 2019

Winner of Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize for the best book in British or Irish rural history.

2018

Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700-1830 (Routledge, 2018) was the winner of Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize for the best book in British or Irish rural history.

Winner of the Women’s History Network Prize for the best first book in women’s or gender history

2018

Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700-1830 (Routledge, 2018) won the Women’s History Network Prize for the best first book in women’s or gender history.

Winner of the Journal of Historical Geography Global Essay Prize

2016

Winner of the Journal of Historical Geography Global Essay Prize for B. McDonagh and C. J. Griffin (2016) ‘Occupy! Historical geographies of property, protest and the commons, 1500-1850’, Journal of Historical Geography 53, pp. 1-10.

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