Kate Mitchell is Professor, Literary Studies, and Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University.  Her research is focused on nineteenth- and twentieth - century literary and cultural history with a particular interest in neo-Victorian fiction and historical recollection in fictional narratives. Her work explores the way literature functions shapes and is shaped by cultural memory, including the way fiction can be used to tell contested histories. She is author of History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages and co-editor, with Dr Nicola Parsons,  of Reading Historical Fiction: the revenant and remembered past . Her articles on historical fiction have appeared in journals including Neo-Victorian Studies and Victoriographies, College Literature and in a number of edited collections.