Arts, Culture and the Environment MA

Year of entry: 2025

Course length: On Campus: 12 months Full-time

About the course

In an era of climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, global pandemic, and social inequality driven by ecological change, how the environment intersects with humanistic questions of culture, values, ethics, and social responsibility is more important than ever.

Combining the study of the environment with methodologies from the arts, on the MA in Arts, Culture and the Environment, you will explore the role played by culture in shaping attitudes towards and responses to environmental change across a wide range of historical and geographic contexts.

Dr Cara Berger

Lecturer in Theatre and Performance and Co-lead for MA Arts, Culture and the Environment

Cara has been teaching in Higher Education since 2014. Her specialisms include dramaturgy and curation, devising and live art practices, modernist and contemporary European theatres, ecology and environmentalism, and feminist and queer theory. She regularly work in teaching innovation, publishing for student audiences and on pedagogical practices. Particularly, I am working on a 'Greening the Curriculum' project that is developing transformational strategies for arts and humanities education in face of the climate catastrophe. She is keen to hear from publishers, colleagues or external organisation that may want to collaborate on aspects of this work. She has published widely on feminism and postdramatic theatre forms based on my PhD research undertaken at the University of Glasgow. Currently, I am working on two major writing projects: a monograph titled 'Ecology, Feminism, Performance: 1962-2020' which is forthcoming with Manchester University Press and an 'The Cambridge Companion to Curating Performance' together with Kate Dorney.

Dr Rachel Winchcombe

Lecturer in Early Modern History and Co-lead for MA Arts, Culture and Society

Rachel is a cultural historian of early modern America, with particular interests in the connections between colonial health, embodiment, and environmental change, and in the ways that different colonial relationships, such as those between colonisers and Indigenous peoples, were formed, maintained, and often destabilised. In April 2021 my first monograph, Encountering early America, was published. It is the first study to comprehensively analyse sixteenth-century English projects in America, arguing that rather than being a period of inconsequential colonial failure, the sixteenth century instead represents a pivotal period in the history of English encounters with the Americas. She completed her PhD at the University of Manchester in 2017 after which she was a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project How we Used to Sleep. Between 2017 and 2020 she was a temporary Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester before moving to the University of Leeds to take up an ISSF Wellcome Research Fellowship in September 2020. In May 2021 she returned to the University of Manchester as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow before taking up the role of Lecturer in Early Modern History in May 2022. My new research project, Environment, Emotion, and Diet in the Early Anglo-American Colonies, 1570-1660, investigates eating practices, access to food, and the connections between health, migration, and diet in a colonial context. The project breaks new ground by juxtaposing colonial environmental history and the history of emotions, and by adopting an interdisciplinary methodology that foregrounds the co-dependencies of colonists, Indigenous peoples, enslaved people, and their physical environments.