Since 2021, Kate has been Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Cologne, where she leads a research hub for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH). Prior to that, she was founding Director of Bath Spa University’s university-wide Research Centre for Environmental Humanities and founding Course Director of the MA in Environmental Humanities. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and an Adjunct Professor of Literary Studies at Monash University (Australia) Having started out as an academic at Monash University in German Studies and Comparative Literature, she turned her focus to the development of the emerging transdisciplinary field of the Environmental Humanities. In 1999, she joined the inaugural Australian Ecological Humanities Research Network, and subsequently became founding President of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture-Australia-New Zealand, and then founding director of the Australia-Pacific Forum on Religion and Ecology@Monash. Her expertise within the Environmental Humanities lies primarily in environmental literary and cultural studies, along with ecophilosophy and ecotheology. Together with Freya Mathews and Sharron Pfueller, she co-founded the journal, Philosophy Activism Nature. Her work is informed by ecological feminist, new materialist and postcolonial thought, as well as by multispecies studies and disaster studies, all of which are interwoven in her work on ‘histories, narratives and ethics for perilous times’, Dancing with Disaster (2015). Her recent monograph, Reclaiming Romanticism (2020), inspired by the work of modern and contemporary poets from North America and Australia, builds towards an “ecopoetics of decolonization”.
