Kate Rigby

Biography

Professor Dr. Kate Rigby (BA Hons and MA Germanic Studies, University of Melbourne, PhD German and Comparative Literature, Monash University) is 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, and visiting scholar in the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, where she founded the UK’s first university-wide Research Centre for Environmental Humanities in 2016. Her research lies at the intersection of environmental literary, philosophical, historical and religious studies, with a specialist interest in European Romanticism, ecopoetics, multispecies studies, and disaster studies. She was the inaugural President of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Australia-New Zealand), and the founding Director of the Australia-Pacific Forum on Religion and Ecology. A founding co-editor of the journal Philosophy Activism Nature, she also co-edited the University Press of Virginia series, Under the Sign of Nature: New Directions in Ecocriticism. Her books include Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004), Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015), Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (2020) and Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction (2023).

Image credit: Jana Bauch