Chair of Humanities (Class A1)
Biography
My research focuses on the human exploitation of the sea. I contend that the harvest of marine resources played a critical, but underappreciated and poorly understood, role in global history. In the past twenty years I have led major research projects that have established marine environmental history as a new and fruitful field of collaboration between the humanities and the natural sciences. My ERC-funded project, NorFish (2015-2020), documented that for several centuries before the Industrial Revolution took off North Atlantic marine extractions were of an order of magnitude comparable to 20th century fisheries. This finding challenges notions of relatively unimpacted marine ecosystems before the Industrial Age and the role of marine resources for human Atlantic crossings. In 2020 I led a team to win the first ever ERC Synergy grant for Ireland. The grant funds a six year research project to build a World Atlas of Human Marine Exploitation through the last two millennia.
Website: http://people.tcd.ie/Profile?Username=holmp#CV_REPS_D_PREF