Katherine Peters

Kate completed her PhD and MA in English at University of Florida. Her literary research and teaching interests include nature, gardens, travel and maps in relation to social and environmental equity. In her dissertation, Disruptive Geographies, she explored literary travel narratives by Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Conrad, Woolf and Sebald to better understand how writers’ embodied relationships with nature and place helped them break free from oppression, give voice to displaced experience and cultivate a better world. Kate contributed to an interdisciplinary think-tank focused on themes of space and time as a visiting Doctoral Fellow at University of Freiburg’s Collaborative Research Centre. As part of her research in-situ, she retraced on-foot W.G. Sebald’s route in The Rings of Saturn along the southeast coast of England. At USM, Kate teaches College Writing and Ancient to Renaissance World Literature, and integrates the Osher Map Library into each of her courses. Her nature essays can be found in the Osher Map Library Blog, The Hopper, Canary and Elsewhere, among other places. She also writes fiction and illustrates. Her current projects include a novel called Wildwood and a picture book about a little girl and a lighthouse. In her free time she bakes bread and gardens.