Research Affiliate
Professor Veronica Strang is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research in Australia, the UK and New Zealand. Her work is concerned with human-environmental relations, materiality, cultural landscapes, and societies’ engagements with water. She has worked with UNESCO and the UN on water and sustainability issues and conducts research assisting indigenous communities’ land and water claims. Her work has contributed to debates on non-human rights, and she recently completed a major comparative study examining historical and contemporary beliefs about water deities and their capacities to illuminate different trajectories of development in human-environmental relationships.
Since completing a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1995, Veronica has held teaching and research positions at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the University’s Environmental Change Unit; the University of Wales; Goldsmiths University; and the University of Auckland. In 2012 she took up a role as the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study. From 2013-2017 she served as the Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth, and from 2017-2022 assisted Research England’s national advisory panel on interdisciplinarity.
n 2000 Veronica received a Royal Anthropological Institute Urgent Anthropology Fellowship, and in 2007 she was awarded an international water prize by UNESCO. In 2019 she was elected as Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Her publications include Uncommon Ground: cultural landscapes and environmental values (Berg 1997); The Meaning of Water (Berg 2004); Gardening the World: agency, identity and the ownership of water (Berghahn 2009); Ownership and Appropriation (Berg 2010); Water: nature and culture (Reaktion 2015) and Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis (Reaktion 2023). Further details are available on her website.
