Katie Holmes is the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Chair in Australian Studies, 2023-34. Her home institution is La Trobe University, Melbourne where she is Director for the Centre for the Study of the Inland.

Katie is an environmental historian and environmental humanities scholar with a particular interest how individuals interact with their culture, society and environment, how they make sense of the world around them and how this changes over time. Her research integrates environmental, gender, oral and cultural history and she has increasingly been working with interdisciplinary teams, including scholars from geography, ecology, visual art, literature and climate science.

Katie’s early books include Spaces in Her Day: Australian Women’s Diaries of the 1920s and 1930s (1995) the co-authored Reading the Garden: The Settlement of Australia (2008), and Between the Leaves: Stories of Australian women, writing and gardens (2011). This latter work marked her foray into environmental history, using personal writings (primarily letters and diaries) to tell environmental stories.

More recently Katie has co-authored Mallee Country: Land, People, History (2020). This book interrogates the ways generations of Indigenous and settler-Australians have shaped and have been shaped by the climate and landscape of the mallee lands of southern Australia, a diverse eco-region that crosses state boundaries and reflects different settlement histories. Katie has also co-edited Telling Environmental Histories: Intersections of Memory, Narrative and Environment (2017)¸a special edition of the journal Environment and History, ‘Placing Gender’ (2021) and of Australian Historical Studies, ‘Australian Generations Oral History Project’ (2016). Katie also has an interest in the history of mental illness and intellectual disability and is a co-author of the Failed Ambitions: Kew Cottages and Changing Ideas of Intellectual Disabilities (2023).

Katie is currently working on environmental humanities projects researching the cultures of drought in regional Victoria, and water cultures and conflicts around water in the Murray Darling Basin ­– a very large interconnected system of rivers and lakes in the interior of southeastern Australia.

Katie is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and has previously held the Keith Cameron Chair in Australian Studies at University College Dublin.