Kate’s career began at Warwick in October 1999. It was her first academic job after completing her PhD in French and German literatures at the University of Exeter.  Kate pursued French and German because studying two languages at school was common in the early 1990s. 

“Anyone who was good at languages tended to do two languages at school. The picture has changed enormously since then. There are now far fewer schools where you can take two languages at A-level.” 

Her PhD covered both French and German, but her academic career led her to focus on French, a language she speaks fluently.  Academic language jobs were scarce, meaning candidates applied for any plausible openings. “Maybe there were three or four posts a year in French back in the 1990s.” 

At the time, few scholars specialised in the French 19th century, so candidates for the Warwick job included PhD students and recent graduates. 

Kate submitted her PhD thesis the day before her interview at Warwick and has remained here since! She attributes her hiring to a lack of specialists in French 19th-century studies at the time. 

“The field was so very under researched; it's improved dramatically over the last 25 years. There are now a really good number of scholars working in the French 19th century, but at the time there really weren’t many.”

“They needed someone to teach the 19^th-century core literature module, called Romanticism and Realism and a comparative English and French core module.” 

"Character building"

Kate’s post combined research and teaching, requiring her to write and deliver four lectures a week on unfamiliar texts, including both French and English 19th-century material (e.g. Wordsworth alongside Rousseau).  

She had a background in the French 19th-century novel as a student, so she wasn’t entirely unprepared, but had to think on her feet and learn quickly. “I like to see it as character building! Lecturing on the English Romantic poets was a long way out of my comfort zone…” 

Modern language departments today are more flexible, allowing staff to incorporate their own research into their teaching. 

Kate’s 2014 REF case study focused on Revolutionary prints held at Waddesdon Manor, a National Trust property, “I'd had a collaborative doctoral award working with Waddesdon Manor to look at their bound volumes of French prints and the PhD student had helped catalogue them and digitise them.” 

Videos from the project were also created and shared on YouTube at a time when academics weren’t really using the platform much and social media was in its infancy. 

A project on Anglo-French relations by one of Kate’s PhD students led to the discovery of French prisoner-of-war theatre materials from Portchester Castle at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  

This research transformed Kate’s focus, leading her to study Napoleonic-era theatre performed by prisoners of war. 

More recently, her work has explored the history of Black Caribbean revolutionaries held as prisoners in the same castle during the revolutionary period. The project revolved around community collaboration to co-produce research.