Professor Kate Mitchell

Kate Mitchell’s research is focused on nineteenth and twentieth-century literary and cultural history, with a particular interest in neo-Victorian fiction and film and contemporary historical recollection in literature and film more generally, including fiction and creative non-fiction. She particularly likes to think about the role of fictional narratives in creating public memory of contested, marginalised or occluded pasts; the ways that ‘memory’ travels through time and space, especially via novels, film and television; and the ethics – and creative possibilities – involved in fictionalising past lives and events; and asks the question, how can fiction be used to speak the unspeakable, in the past and today?

Her current major project examines the use of art and the figure of the artist in contemporary fiction about the Victorian period, including the representation of the Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionists and other artists and their work.

Her research and teaching interests also include Jane Austen (her novels and her afterlives in contemporary fiction, film and media); period drama, as well as adaptation and remediation more generally; and Victorian gothic fiction.

She is author of History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages and co-editor of Reading Historical Fiction: the revenant and remembered past. Her articles on historical fiction have appeared in journals including Neo-Victorian Studies, Australian Literary Studies, Victoriographies, College Literature and in a number of edited collections.

She is passionate about the value of humanities and the arts in the university and beyond.