Rate My Professor Katherine Bode

Professor Katherine Bode is Professor of Literary and Textual Studies in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University. She completed a PhD in English at the University of Queensland in 2006, receiving the Dean's Commendation for Outstanding Research Higher Degree Theses, and holds a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in English from James Cook University in 2000, where she was awarded the University Medal and Graduate Association Medal. She also earned a Graduate Certificate in Education from the University of Sydney in 2008. Bode's career includes an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney from 2007 to 2010, a lectureship in English at the University of Tasmania from 2009 to 2010, and joining ANU in 2011 as Senior Lecturer in Literary and Textual Studies and Head of the Centre for Digital Humanities Research until 2013. She moved to a continuing position in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics in 2016, became Associate Professor from 2016 to 2017, and Professor in 2020, while serving as an ARC Future Fellow from 2018 to 2023.

Bode's research specializations encompass digital humanities, computational literary studies, data-rich literary history, book history, publishing studies, reading and reception studies, and Australian literature. Her major publications include the books A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (University of Michigan Press, 2018), Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (Anthem Press, 2012), and Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, co-edited with Paul Arthur). Key articles feature Why You Can’t Model Away Bias (Modern Language Quarterly, 2020), The Equivalence of “Close” and “Distant” Reading; or, Toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History (Modern Language Quarterly, 2017), and What's the Matter with Computational Literary Studies? (Critical Inquiry, 2023). She leads public-facing projects such as the To be continued: The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database and edits a series with Obiter Press publishing forgotten colonial Australian fiction. Bode has secured multiple ARC grants, including Discovery Projects and a Special Research Initiative, and received honors such as election as Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2020, the Outstanding Early Career Alumni Award from James Cook University in 2014, and various fellowships including at King’s College London and Freie University Berlin. Her scholarship, with 212 Scopus citations and an h-index of 7, advances literary studies through digital methods.