Kate is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History and teaches History and International Studies. Kate has special interests in the history of the family and postwar social movements, and is currently researching the history of fatherhood in twentieth century Australia as part of the Australian Research Council funded research project Fatherhood: an Australian history 1919-2019, with team members Mike Roper (Essex University), John Murphy (University of Melbourne) and Monash colleagues Alistair Thomson, Johnny Bell and Jill Barnard.

Kate is a graduate of the University of Tasmania (where she was a University medallist) and Monash University. Her PhD, which addressed the meanings attached to the city and the country in early twentieth-century public life in Australia, won a 2007 Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal.

Kate's first book, Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender, and the Rural-Urban Divide (Peter Lang, 2010) explored the powerful influence of rurality in shaping Australian culture and modernity more broadly.

Kate authored (with co-author Professor Graeme Davison) a history of Monash University entitled University Unlimited: The Monash Story (Allen and Unwin, 2012). The history spans the founding of Monash in the full flush of post-war prosperity, the baby boom and the growing demand for higher education; the student experience and 'troubles' of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it became a symbolic centre for student radicalism in Australia; and the reforms and expansion from the late 1980s that have transformed Monash into Australia's largest and most international university.