Catherine Elizabeth Rigby FAHA (born 1960 in Canberra, Australia)[1] is a scholar in the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities.
In addition, she spent a year at the University of Freiburg on a DAAD postgraduate scholarship (1982–83) and a year at the University of Paderborn on an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship, where she was mentored by Germany's first Professor of Women's Studies, Gisela Ecker (1994).
[2] In 2005, she was elected as Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, in recognition of her international standing as an ecocritical scholar in German and Comparative Literature.
[9] She subsequently became the inaugural President of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Australia-New Zealand) (2004), the founding convenor of the Australia-Pacific Forum on Religion and Ecology (2011), a key researcher with the Humanities for the Environment Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory (2013),[2] and a member of the Luce Foundation-funded research network "Facing the Anthropocene: Rethinking Humanity's Place in the World" project, led by Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics.
[10] She has also held research fellowships at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (2015 and 2021),[11][12] and at the Rachel Carson Center of the Ludwig-Maximilian’s University, Munich (2020).