Professor

Kate Rigby

Personal statement

I was appointed to Bath Spa University in 2016 as the founding Director of our university-wide strategic Research Centre for Environmental Humanities and founding Course Director of our MA in Environmental Humanities. I am 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, I came to dedicate myself enthusiastically to the development of the emerging transdisciplinary field of the Environmental Humanities. I joined the inaugural Australian Ecological Humanities Research Network in 1999, 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.

My 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, I co-founded the journal, Philosophy Activism Nature. Much of my research has been focused historically on the Romantic period, with German and British philosophies of nature and poetics of place featuring in my 2004 monograph, Topographies of the Sacred. My 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 my work on ‘histories, narratives and ethics for perilous times’, Dancing with Disaster (2015) (which includes a suddenly highly topical chapter on ‘Spreading Pestilence’). In my most recent monograph, Reclaiming Romanticism (2020), I draw several salient strands out of the tangled legacy of European Romanticism and weave them into an ‘ecopoetics of decolonization’, inspired by the work of a range of modern and contemporary poets from North America and Australia.

I am interested in supervising PhD projects in environmental literary, cultural and/or religious studies, especially with a focus on biodiversity loss, climate change, disaster preparedness.

Image credit: Sara Penrhyn Jones

Academic qualifications

• BA(Hons) University of Melbourne
• MA University of Melbourne
• PhD Monash University.

Professional qualifications

• Fellow, Australian Academy of the Humanities
• Fellow, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Professional memberships

• Executive Committee, European Forum for the Study of Religion and Environment.
• Advisory Board, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment-UK-Ireland.
• Advisory Board, Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia-New Zealand.
• Senior Editor, Philosophy Activism Nature journal.
• Member, Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory in Environmental Humanities.
• Gender Advisory Board of the International Comparative Literature Association.
• Editorial Advisory Boards of the journals: Environmental Humanities; Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; Ecozon@; Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism; Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology; Orbis Literarum. International Review of Literary Studies; ANGERMION, a journal of Anglo-German Studies.
• Member, MLA.
• Member, ASLEC-ANZ.
• Member, American Academy of Religion.

Other external roles

• Adjunct Professor, Monash University.

Teaching specialism

Environmental Humanities