Kate Rossmanith

Biography

Kate Rossmanith is an ethnographer, a writer, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She co-leads a program of research on the role that imagination plays in knowledge-making and world-building. She researches narrative and emotion-concepts in legal processes, as well as methods and forms of writing. She will be a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing in 2026.

Kate is recognised as a leading scholar on remorse. She is the author of Small Wrongs: How we really say sorry in love, life and law (nominated for national and international literary awards), and co-editor of the collection Remorse and Criminal Justice: Multi-disciplinary perspectives (Routledge 2022). She has led symposia and workshops nationally and internationally for criminal justice researchers and practitioners; and has collaborated with scholars worldwide. Her research has informed the working practices of judges, coroners, lawyers, police, and parole authorities, and has improved outcomes for people caught up in criminal justice processes. Her documentary film Unnatural Deaths is being used to counsel bereaved families on whether to view crime scene images. 

Kate’s ARC Future Fellowship project is on ‘closure’ as an emotional expectation in the justice system and in people’s lives.

She studies how researchers and writers use different writing-forms – traditional scholarly writing as well as fiction, essay, memoir, poetry – to open up new thinking-and-feeling spaces. Her research on ‘voice’ and its epistemological affordances is informing the fields of fiction and nonfiction via her widely read essays ‘Ditching the New Yorker Voice’ (2022) and ‘On Not Asking “Should I Insert Myself in the Text?”’ (2023). Her essays have appeared in publications including Public Books, Lit Hub Daily, Sydney Review of Books, The Monthly, Guardian Australia, The Australian, Inside Story, and Best Australian Essays 2007. 

Kate is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) degree and a PhD from the University of Sydney. 

www.katerossmanith.com

PhD Theses - Principal Supervisions

• Farz Edraki, 'How Can Interviews Inform Fiction? The use of "testimonial technique" in creative practice', currently enrolled
• Tiffany Hambley, 'Bodies of Knowledge: The authorial body in literary memoirs', currently enrolled
• Josephine Wilson, ‘Mixed Messages: Representations of intimate partner abuse in Australian true crime narratives’, Macquarie University, awarded 2024.
• Graeme Friedman,‘The Weaponised Witness in Apartheid’s Political Trials: Shame, Terror and Storytelling in the Waging of Lawfare’, Macquarie University, awarded 2023 (with Vice-Chancellor's Commendation).
• Belinda Lopez, 'Finding Papua in Java: Papuans encounter stories about the past and themselves', Macquarie University, awarded 2020.
• Jessica Kirkness ‘Writing Deafness: Disability creative nonfiction writing and stories of lived experience’, Macquarie University, awarded 2019 (with Vice-Chancellor's Commendation).
• Amy Bauder ‘Beyond the Bush Ballad: Authenticity in Australian country music since the 1980s’, Macquarie University, awarded 2016.
• Vanessa Berry ‘Cataloguing Sydney:  Blogging and the classification of urban experience’, Macquarie University, awarded 2016.
• Kathryn Knight ‘Strange Country: Explorations through the territories of motherhood and child disability’, Macquarie University, awarded 2015
• Patrick Grant ‘The Body on the Boards: Materiality and movement in the production of comics and graphic novels’, Macquarie University, awarded 2014

Masters Research Theses - Principal Supervisions

• Nadine Browne, 'Promised Land: Exploring end-of-world narratives, resurrection metaphors, and identity formation through memoir', currently enrolled
• Tiffany Hambley, 'Body as Writer, Writer as Body: Siri Hustvedt, Hillary Mantel, and Hanif Kureishi', Macquarie University, awarded 2024.
• Rosie Shorter, ‘Unhappily Ever-After: How a promise of happiness is used to regulate desire and behaviour in Protestant Evangelical Christianity’, Macquarie University, awarded 2017.
• Jessica Kirkness ‘Dis-abling the Hearing Line: Deafness, deaf studies, and creative nonfiction’, Macquarie University, awarded 2014.