Kathleen Kete

Kathleen Kete is the Borden W. Painter, Jr., ’58/H’95 Professor of European History and Secretary of the Faculty at Trinity College, CT. She received her PhD in History from Harvard University in 1989, with a year en passant at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris. Her undergraduate degree is from the Harvard Extension School, which she received while working at the Harvard College Observatory, Astronomical Plates Stacks Library. Her research works to broaden the field of history by including within its purview previously neglected but rich subjects of study. Her first book, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth Century Paris (1994) helped create the thriving field of the cultural history of animals. This was followed by an edited volume, A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire, 1800-1920 (2007), volume five of a series which received an Outstanding Academic Title award from Choice Reviews. A second major project addressed the complicated history of attitudes towards ambition in French culture. Her book on this subject, Making Way for Genius: The Aspiring Self in France from the Old Regime to the New, was published in 2012. Currently, she is writing a history of Geneva and the Alps in the eighteenth century provisionally titled, Becoming Visible: A History of the Alps in the Age of the French Revolution.