Sarah Kerr

I am originally from Bangor, Co Down and studied at Queen's University Belfast (BSc (Hons) Geography, Archaeology-Palaeoecology, MSc Professional Archaeology, and PhD Archaeology). I completed postdoctoral fellowships at KU Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs) and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland, funded by TCD) before I started teaching archaeology and heritage studies at The University of Sheffield (UK). I held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship at Aarhus University (Denmark) before joining UCC in September 2023 as lecturer in Radical Humanities and Archaeology.

As a buildings archaeologist, I am interested primarily in the built environment of medieval Europe and have written about English lodging ranges, castles and great houses, and Irish tower houses and round towers. I am interested in how buildings were the products of social norms and expectations and how, in return, they were agents that shaped everyday life. I am equally interested in the role of historic buildings in our contemporary society and have explored the impacts of climate change on our built heritage in Ireland, Scotland and Denmark. I have written and published on the important role heritage has in climate communication and climate action, and I continue to work on the topic in West Cork.