Prof. Dr. Kate Rigby

Kate Rigby is professor of environmental humanities at Bath Spa University, where she directs the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities together with associated MA and PhD programs, and adjunct professor of literary studies at Monash University (Melbourne). She has a background in German studies and comparative literature, and her research lies at the intersection of environmental literary, philosophical, historical, and religious studies, with a specialist interest in European Romanticism, ecopoetics, and ecotheology. In 1999, Kate joined Australia’s cross-disciplinary National Working Group for the Ecological Humanities, and in 2004 had the honor of becoming the inaugural president of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Australia-New Zealand). In 2011 she also led the creation of the Australia-Pacific Forum on Religion and Ecology. In 2002, she co-founded the eco-humanities journal Philosophy Activism Nature, and is now co-editor of the University Press of Virginia series, Under the Sign of Nature. Following on from an interdisciplinary study of cultural-historical constructions of ‘natural disaster’ viewed in the horizon of deepening climate crisis (Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times), her most recent monograph reconsiders the ecopoetic legacies of European Romanticism through a decolonial lens (Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards and Ecopoetics of Decolonization). Her current research responds to the escalating extinction crisis through an ecopoetic engagement with a neglected genre in Christian literature, a sequence of meditations on the biblical six days of creation (‘Hexameron’).

RCC Research Project: Reimagining Creation in an Era of Extinction: An Hexameron for the Anthropocene

Selected Publications:

• Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

• “Weaving the Environmental Humanities: Australian strands, configurations, and provocations.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 23, no. 1 (2019): 5-18 (special issue on the environmental humanities).

• “Religion and Ecology: Towards a Communion of Creatures.” In Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 273-294. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.

• Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.

• edited with Axel Goodbody. Ecocritical Theory: New European Perspectives. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.