Dr Caroline Cornish
Humanities Research Coordinator
Department
Team
Specialism
Plant humanities, histories and geographies of museums and collections, history of botany, colonial and imperial history.
I am Humanities Research Coordinator at Kew and an honorary research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. I’ve been researching Kew’s history and collections since 2005 and Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany was the subject of my PhD thesis. Since then, I’ve been involved in a number of collaborative research projects between Kew and Royal Holloway, including Mobile Museum (2017-19), and Where Next? Plant Humanities (2021), both of which were funded by AHRC. Currently I am Co-investigator on Connecting Mobilities Research between the UK and South Korea, a collaborative project between researchers in the UK and South Korea, funded by ESRC and AHRC.
I have worked in the museum and academic sectors and have published widely on aspects of the history of Kew and economic botany.
- 2004: BA Art History, University of Roehampton
- 2007: MA Museum Studies, Institute of Archaeology, University College London
- 2013: PhD "Curating science in an age of empire: Kew's Museum of Economic Botany," Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL)
- 2013: Post-Doctoral Fellow, ‘Re-enchanting economic botany’, AHRC Cultural Engagement Award, RHUL
- 2013-14: Cataloguer, Harrod Materia Medica collection, Kew
- 2015: Visiting lecturer, RHUL
- 2017-19: AHRC Research Fellow, ‘Mobile Museum’ project, Kew-RHUL
- 2019: Board Member, Museums and Galleries History Group (MGHG)
- 2020: Senior Research Officer, Plant Humanities, RHUL
- 2020: Reviewer, AHRC Peer Review College
- 2021: Co-I, ‘Where Next? Plant Humanities’, Kew-RHUL
- 2020-22: Co-I, ‘Plant humanities: where arts, humanities and plants meet’, AHRC ‘Where next?’ award, Kew-RHUL
- 2022-24: Co-I, ‘Connecting Mobilities Research between the UK and South Korea’, AHRC UK-South Korea Connections award
- October 2022: Humanities Research Coordinator, Kew
Driver, F. & C. Cornish (2021)
Plant Humanities: Where arts, humanities, and plants meet
The Ethnobotanical Assembly (TEA) (Winter 2021).
Cornish, C., F. Driver, M. Nesbitt & J. Willison (2021)
Revitalizing the School Museum: Using Nature-Based Objects for Cross-Curricular Learning
Journal of Museum Education 46 (2021): 334-347
Cornish, C. (2015)
Collecting Photographs, Constructing Disciplines: The Rationality and Rhetoric of Photography at the Museum of Economic Botany
In E Edwards & C Morton (eds), Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and Information. 1st edn, Bloomsbury, London, UK, pp. 119-137.
Cornish, C. & Nesbitt, M. (2014)
Historical Perspectives on Western Ethnobotanical Collections.
In J Salick, K Konchar & M Nesbitt (eds), Curating Biocultural Collections: A Handbook. 1st edn, Kew Publishing, London, UK, pp. 271-290.
Cornish, C. (2012)
"Useful and Curious": A Totem Pole at Kew's Timber Museum'
Journal of Museum Ethnography, 2012 (25):38-151.
Driver, F., M. Nesbitt & C. Cornish (eds.) (2021)
Mobile Museums: Collections in Circulation
UCL Press
Cornish, C., P. Allan, L. Gardiner, P. Nicol, H. Pardoe, C. Sherwood, R. Webster, D. Young & M. Nesbitt (2020)
Between Metropole and Province: circulating botany in British museums, 1870-1940
Archives of Natural History 47 (2020): 124-46
Cornish, C. & F. Driver (2019)
‘Specimens distributed’: the circulation of objects from Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany, 1847–1914
Journal of the History of Collections 32 (2020): 327–40
Cornish, C. & M. Nesbitt (2018)
The Life Cycle of a Museum
In K. von Zinnenburg Carroll (ed.), Botanical Drift: Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium
Sternberg Press, pp. 19-21
Cornish, C. (2017)
Botany behind Glass: The Vegetable Kingdom on Display at Kew's Museum of Economic Botany
In C. Berkowitz & B. Lightman (eds.), Science Museums in Transition: Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 188-214.
Nesbitt, M. & C. Cornish, C. (2016)
Seeds of industry and empire: economic botany collections between nature and culture
Journal of Museum Ethnography 29: 53–70.
Cornish, C. (2015)
Collecting Photographs, Constructing Disciplines: The Rationality and Rhetoric of Photography at the Museum of Economic Botany
In E. Edwards & C. Morton (eds.), Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and Information. Bloomsbury, London, pp. 119-137.
Cornish, C. (2015)
Curating global knowledge: The Museum of Economic Botany at Kew Gardens
In D. A. Finnegan and J. Wright (eds.), Spaces of Global Knowledge: Exhibition, Encounter and Exchange in an Age of Empire, Ashgate, 119-142
Cornish, C. (2015)
Nineteenth-century museums and the shaping of disciplines
Museum History Journal 8: 8-27
Cornish, C., P. Gasson & M. Nesbitt (2014)
The wood collection (Xylarium) of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
IAWA Journal 35: 85-104
Cornish, C. & Nesbitt, M. (2014)
Historical Perspectives on Western Ethnobotanical Collections.
In J. Salick, K. Konchar & M. Nesbitt (eds.), Curating Biocultural Collections: A Handbook, Kew Publishing.
Cornish, C. (2012)
"Useful and Curious": A Totem Pole at Kew's Timber Museum
Journal of Museum Ethnography, 2012 (25):38-151.