Katherine Collins

Katherine Collins is a researcher at the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, and Honorary Fellow at the Department of Education, Oxford. Her research interests include creative practice as research, critical pedagogies and epistemologies of the south, and research cultures.
She has published on the intersections of research and poetry, and fiction and the archive. With Elleke Boehmer, she founded the Southern Lives Network in 2020, and co-edited the essay collection Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere: Texts, Spaces, Resonances (Bloomsbury, 2024).
She is the PI of ‘Extractivism and Antarctica: making a more-than-human story’, funded by the British Academy and the Wellcome Trust. The research will explore how non-human perspectives and elements such as ice, water, rock, scientific data and equipment, animal lives, historical artefacts, and artistic responses can be included as interdependent partners with humans in a collaborative story-making process.
She is also a poet, with work in Propel Magazine, The Rialto, bath magg, Shearsman Magazine, and Finished Creatures, and the anthology Science of the Seas, among others. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Manchester Writing School. In 2022, her collaboration ‘They multiply their wings’, with composer Christopher Cook, won the Rosamond Prize and in 2023 her poem ‘Islands in silence’ was highly commended in the Plough Prize.