Ertegun Director and Senior Scholar in Residence

Katherine Ibbett took up the position of Director and Senior Scholar in Residence at Ertegun House in September 2026. Her primary role is to support a body of first-class international graduate students who are studying across the full range of humanities subjects, from linguistics to theology, from classical archaeology to contemporary literature.

Katherine is a specialist in early modern French literature and cultural history, roughly from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, and in French colonial projects in the Americas during that period. She has just completed a book manuscript entitled Reading with Rivers in the Early Modern French World. Her publications include Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (Penn, 2018), which won the Biennial Book Prize of the Society for Renaissance Studies, and The Style of the State in French Theater 1630-1660 (Ashgate, 2009); she has also edited or co-edited volumes on Walter Benjamin, on histories of compassion and of love, and on comparatism, and written about emotion and affect as both a theoretical and historical question. 

She is currently writing about ingratitude in seventeenth-century writing, and beginning a project about how twentieth-century English women writers read women writers of the French seventeenth century. 

Her work has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. She has held visiting positions in the US, Australia, and China. 

Aside from her academic work, Katherine is interested in bringing conversations in the environmental humanities to new audiences, and is working with colleagues to curate a series of public performances and artworks around the idea of rivers, planned for autumn 2028.

You can find more about Katherine’s work on her Faculty page here.