Niamh Brennan

Biography

My specialisation is in the area of narrative hermeneutics, environmental hermeneutics, eco-cosmology, spirituality and philosophies of the self. It is part of a growing collaboration between the sciences and the humanities, where increasingly, insights from the humanities are drawn on to re-think and re-interpret environmental issues, in addition to concepts of the environment itself. Understandings of the human and how they are attained, play a central role in these studies, particularly in our relation to nature and the means through which this relationship is articulated, and how this articulation potentially affects our action.  I draw heavily on cultural historian and historian of world religions, Thomas Berry. Berry has been a leading proponent of the ecological crisis, and how to address it, since the 1970s. I also draw on the narrative hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, environmental philosophy and eco-spirituality. One of the primary findings of my PhD thesis was the manner in which the text of The Universe Story (co-written by Berry with mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme) implicitly calls for a development of human subjectivity in addition to a change of narrative towards not only mitigating the ecological crisis but in addressing some of its root causes.