Kate is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History. She teaches History and International Studies, and is currently researching Australian student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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 is particularly interested in the role played by gender in Australian culture, and in the history of the family. She has co-authored several articles on the history of formal adoption in Australia.

Kate has taught extensively in the fields of Australian history, modern European history (especially gender history and sexuality), and International Studies. 

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.

Kate's current research is on the Australian student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.