McKee, Kate

Academic background

Kate completed her A.B. in Italian and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, with a final-year dissertation on the breadmaking of the fifteenth-century Poor Clare, St. Catherine of Bologna. She moved to Oxford in 2022 for the MSt in Modern Languages at New College. In 2023, she began the DPhil in Modern Languages at New College, where her research is generously supported by the AHRC OOC DTP, All Souls College, and the Clarendon Fund.

Teaching

Undergraduate: At St Anne’s, Kate teaches Italian Prelims Papers III (Lyric Poetry) and IV (Modern Italian Narrative and Cinema), and Italian Finals Paper VII (Renaissance). She also teaches Prelims translation into English for the Italian Sub-Faculty.

Research interests

Kate’s DPhil project looks at smells and smelling in medieval Italian literature from the early vernacular poets (the Sicilian School) to Dante, roughly 1220-1321. The project considers the sense across many contexts – scientific, medical, theological, cultural – to trace its complex literary presence in Italy during the later Middle Ages.

Her broader research interests lie in literatures and histories of the body, medicine, and science.

Recent Publications

For an up-to-date list of conference papers and publications, please visit Kate’s Faculty webpage: https://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/people/kate-mckee.