Prof. Dr. Catherina Rigby – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Catherina Rigby

Bath Spa University
Environmental Humanities

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
October – December 2021

Last Update: 31.08.2022

Curriculum Vitae

Professor Dr. Kate Rigby (Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow) is the founding Director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University and Adjunct Professor of Literary Studies at Monash University (Melbourne). She is a graduate of the University of Melbourne (BA and MA), and Monash University (PhD), and also spent a year studying at the University of Freiburg on a DAAD scholarship. A key researcher with the Humanities for the Environment Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory, she was the inaugural President of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Australia-New Zealand), and convener of the Australia-Pacific Forum on Religion and Ecology@Monash. She was a founding co-editor of the journal Philosophy Activism Nature, and she has published seven books (two as co-editor), along with numerous articles and book chapters across the fields of German Studies, comparative literature, and environmental humanities. Her research lies at the intersection of environmental literary, philosophical, historical and religious studies, with a specialist interest in European Romanticism, ecopoetics, and interdisciplinary climate change, disaster and extinction studies. She is currently involved in a UK Research and Innovation research network on religion and extinction, and a LUCE-funded research network, based at Duke University, entitled ‘Facing the Anthropocene’. Whilst at FRIAS, she will be collaborating with the FRIAS focus group on the Environmental Humanities.

Professor Kate Rigby (Bath Spa University and Monash University) has been awarded a Research Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center from September to December 2020, where she will be contributing to research on the topic of extinctions, viewed through the lens of the environmental humanities: Fellowship Rachel Carson Center, LMU München.

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 23.1 (2019), special issue on the Environmental Humanities, ed. Graham Huggan, pp. 5-18.
“Mines aren’t really like that’: German Romantic Undergrounds Revisited,” commissioned by Heather Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann for German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017, pp. 111-28.
“Nature, Language, and Religion: Herder and Beyond,” commissioned by Gabriele Duerbeck, Urte Stobbe, Hubert Zapf, and Evi Zemanek for Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, Lanham: Lexington Books,2017, pp. 31-42.
Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015).
(co-edited) Ecocritical Theory: New European Perspectives (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2011).
Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004).

FRIAS Project

Religion, Resilience and the Multispecies City

This project will contribute to environmental humanities research addressing multifaceted questions of resilience through the examination of faith-based advocacy for, and engagement in, biodiversity conservation in the global context of declining wildlife populations, diminishing genetic diversity and escalating species extinction. Within this wider project, I propose to undertake a theologically-inflected and scientifically-informed ‘multispecies ethnography’ of the ‘greening’ of sacred spaces in German cities, focussing on the creation of habitat for pollinators in churchyards. In particular, this research will investigate the potential of such initiatives to enhance both human psychological resilience by mitigating ecological grief, and ecosystem resilience by providing habitat for threatened species. By demonstrating the contribution of eco-religious studies to current multidisciplinary resilience research, the project also seeks to enhance the resilience of the humanities in the face of changing academic values and university priorities.