Professor

Kate Rigby

Personal statement

Having started out as an academic at Monash University in German Studies and Comparative Literature, I have since come to dedicate my work enthusiastically to the development of the emerging multi-, inter- and now even trans-disciplinary 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 studies, along with ecophilosophy, and ecology and religion. Together with Freya Mathews and Sharron Pfueller, I co-founded the journal, Philosophy Activism Nature, of which I remain Senior Editor. Much of my research has been focussed 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. More recently, I have conducted ecocritical research in Australian literature and socio-environmental history from the perspective of the ethics and poetics of decolonisation. My work is informed by ecological feminist and postcolonial thought, as well as by multi-species studies and climate change research, all of which are interwoven in my most recent monograph, Dancing with Disaster (2015).

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