Professor Kate Douglas

Kate is a researcher in the fields of Life Narrative Studies, Children's Literature, and Childhood Studies. She researches and teaches contemporary modes of life storying with a particular interest in children’s narratives and narratives of childhood. Kate is the author of Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (Rutgers, 2010) and the co-author (with Anna Poletti) of Life Narratives and Youth Cultures: Representation, Agency and Participation (Palgrave, 2016) and the author of Children and Biography: Reading and Writing Life Stories (Bloomsbury, 2022). She is the co-editor (with Gillian Whitlock) of Trauma Texts (Routledge, 2009) and (with Kylie Cardell) Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth (Routledge, 2015). With Dr Ashley Barnwell, she is the co-editor of Research Methods for Auto/Biography Studies (Routledge, 2019).

Kate is also engaged in the Scholarship of Learning and Teaching (SoTL). She is an award-winning educator and a strong advocate of research-led teaching and teaching-led research. She was a co-colloborator in the OLT-funded project: "Building Reading Resilience: Developing a Skill-Based Approach to Literary Studies" (with Tully Barnett, Rosanne Kennedy, Anna Poletti and Jude Seaboyer). Her SoTL interests include: pedagogies of reading; teaching life narrative; teaching university English; and the importance of the Bachelor of Arts degree.

Kate co-directs the Life Narrative Research Group at Flinders University, the only research group in the field in Australia. She  is the Head of the steering committee for the International Auto/Biography Association Asia-Pacific chapter, and is a member of the Executive Committee of IABA (World). Kate is one of the co-editors of Bloomsbury’s 'New Directions in Life Narrative' book series.