Associate Professor Kate Rigby

I completed my PhD at Monash University in 1991. In my thesis, which has since been published as a monograph, I explored the phenomenon of the 'dialectic of enlightenment' in German drama in the late 18th and early 19th century. I was offered a Lectureship in German Studies at Monash that year, and in 1997 I was promoted to Senior Lecturer. Since 1996, I have also been on the Board of the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, and from 1999 to 2004, I held a dual appointment in German and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. I am now located solely within the Centre, of which I was the Director from 2004-2007.

On the strength of my doctoral research, I was asked by Melbourne University Press to write a book on contemporary German feminist theory. In order to undertake further research for this book, which I subsequently wrote in collaboration with my colleague at Monash, Silke Beinssen-Hesse, I applied for a Humboldt Fellowship, which took me to Paderborn for most of 1994 to work under the mentorship of the eminent German feminist scholar, Gisela Ecker.

In addition to my research in the area of German Studies, I have a strong interest in ecological thought. In 1999 I co-edited a collection of essays on "Ecology, Gender and the Sacred" with my colleague in Historical Studies, Constant Mews, and I have published several articles and book chapters in the areas of ecospirituality, ecophilosophy and ecocriticism. I am President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (Australia-New Zealand). I am also a co-editor, with Sharron Pfueller and Freya Mathews, of a journal called PAN (Philosophy Activism Nature). In 2004, my new book,Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism was published by the University of Virginia Press in their Ecocriticism series, Under the Sign of Nature: New Directions in Ecocriticism .

Research interests

My primary research interest in German Studies is in the literature and philosophy of the Age of Goethe, and in German thought in the twentieth century (especially, German Critical Theory and phenomenology). In recent years, my research has been concentrated in the area of the ecological humanities, with a particular emphasis on ecofeminism, ecocriticism and ecology and religion. My new book Topographies of the Sacred undertakes an ecocritical reconsideration of literary, philosophical and religious discourses on nature, place and poiesis in German and English Romanticism. I am currently examining the eco-cultural history of the Canberra area, and as a member of an ARC-funded collaborative research team, I am looking at eco-utopian thinking and practice in relation to the creation of Canberra as Australia's federal capital. My newest research project is concerned with the cultural mediation of environmental catastrophe.

Teaching interests

In CCLCS, I teach introductory comparative literary and cultural studies, Romanticism and ecocritical studies. I also give some lectures in the first year units in European studies. At Honours/Masters level I teach on ecology and the sacred in Religious Studies, and at postgraduate level, I have the pleasure of supervising a large number of students researching a wide range of topics across a number of disciplines.

I am particularly interested in supervising new graduate student projects relating to culture and ecology in Australia; culture and environmental catastrophe; and ecocriticism and European thought.

Selected publications

Books

• 1996: Transgressions of the Feminine. Tragedy, Enlightenment and the Figure of Women in Classical German Drama, 270 pp. (Heidelberg: Winter, Reihe Siegen).
• (With Silke Beinssen-Hesse) Out of the Shadows. Contemporary German Feminism, c. 120 pp. (Melbourne: MUP, "Interpretations" series).
• 1999: Ecology, Gender and the Sacred, Clayton: Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology, Monash University - co-edited, with an introduction, co-written with Constant Mews.
• 2004: Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism. Romanticism, Ecology and the Poetics of Place (University Press of Virginia).

Refereed Articles

• 1989: "Revelation and Reification: The Place of the Female Body in the Interplay of Tragedy and Enlightenment", Antithesis Vol.2, 2 (1988/89), pp.53-58.
• "Georg Lukcs and the Disintegration of Dramatic Form: The Tragedy of Modernity", Thesis Eleven, 24 (1989), pp.112-131.
• 1992: "The Return of the Repressed, or the Strange Case of Kleistian Feminism", Southern Review 25/3 (1992) pp.320-332.
• "Beyond the Frame: Art, Ecology and the Aesthetics of Nature", Thesis Eleven, 32 (1992), pp.114-128 (review article).
• 1998: "Women and Nature Revisited", Arena Journal no. 12, pp. 143-69 (review article).
• 2000: "Goethean Science and the Blindness of Faust", Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, 7.2 (Summer 2000), 25-42.
• 2001: "The Discovery of (the Other) Place in European Romanticism,"European Romantic Review 12.2 (Spring 2001), Special Issue on Romanticism and the Physical, 165-74.
• 2001: "Recovering from the Fall: The Greening of Modernity," AUMLA(Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association) 96 (Nov. 2001), Special Issue on Nature and the Environment, 35-48.
• Kate Rigby 'Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis',New Literary History, 35.3 (Summer 2004), 427-42.
• 2006: “Writing After Nature,” Australian Humanities Review, Issue 39-40 (Sept. 2006),
  online at: http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-September-2006/rigby.html
• 2007: “Tragedy, Modernity and Terra Mater: Christa Wolf Recounts the Fall,”
  New German Critique 101 (Summer 2007), 115-141.
• 2008: “Discoursing on Disaster: The Hermeneutics of Environmental Catastrophe,” Tamkang Review 39.1, 19-40.
• 2009: “Dancing with Disaster,” Australian Humanities Review Issue 46 (May 2009), online at http://epress.anu.edu.au/ahr/046/pdf/eh04.pdf

Book Chapters

• 1996: "Die Inszenierung des Weiblichen. Mythos und Aufklrung im Drama"("Staging the Feminine. Myth and Enlightenment in Drama"), in Corina Caduff (ed.), Das Geschlecht der Knste (The Gender of Art), Cologne and Weimar: Bhlau, 1-30.
• 1998: "Myth, Memory, Attunement: Towards a Sensuous Semiotics of Place", in C. Houston et al. (eds) Imagined Places. The Politics of Making Space, Bundoora: School of Sociology, Politics and Anthropology, La Trobe University, 175-82.
• 1999: "Forests of the Night: Topographies of the Sacred in European Romanticism", in M. Griffith and J. Tulip (eds), Spirit of Place: Source of the Sacred? Sydney: Centre for Studies in Religion, Literature and the Arts, Australian Catholic University, 328-337.
• 2001: "The Goddess Returns: Ecofeminist Reconfigurations of Gender, Nature and the Sacred", in F. Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden (eds), Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions, New York: OUP, 23-54.
• 2002: "Ecocriticism", in Julian Wolfreys (ed.), Introducing criticism at the 21st century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 151-78.
• 2003: "Tuning in the Spirit of Place" in J. Cameron (ed.) Changing Places: Re-imagining Australia Longueville Books, Sydney, pp. 107-115.
• 2004: "The Rebirth of Nature in Romantic Thought" in H. Heinze, C. Weller and H. Kreutz (eds) Worlds of Reading: On the Theory, History and Sociology of Cultural Practice, Festschrift for Walter Veit Peter Lang, Frankfurt, pp. 387-397.
• 2007: Ecopoetics of the Limestone Plains,” in C.A. Cranston and Robert Zeller, The Littoral Zone. Australian Contexts and their Writers. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007: 153-75.
• 2007: “Prometheus Redeemed? From Autoconstruction to Ecopoetics,” Catherine Keller and Laurel Kearns (eds), Eco-Spirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth. Fordham University Press, 2007: 270-94
• 2008: “Noah’s Ark Revisited: (Counter-)Utopianism and (Eco-)Catastrophe,” commissioned by Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Simon Sellars for Demanding the Impossible: Utopia and Dystopia, North Carlton: Arena Publications, 163-78.
• 2008: “(Post-)koloniale Inkorperierung: Ökologie und Esskultur in Australien,” commissioned by Claudia Lillge and Anne-Rose Meyer for Interkulturelle Mahlzeiten: Kulinarische Begegnungen und Kommunikation in der Literatur, Bielefeld: transcript, 315-36.

Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Research Seminars

• 2001: 'What are Poets For? Heidegger's Gift to Ecocriticism'. [PDF 226KB]
• 2002: 'The Return of Nature as Art: An Ecocritical Perspective on Romantic Aesthetics' . [PDF 390KB]