Dr Katherine Collins

Katherine Collins is a researcher at the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, and Honorary Fellow at the Department of Education, Oxford. Her research interests include creative practice as research, critical pedagogies and epistemologies of the south, and research cultures.

She has published on the intersections of research and poetry, and fiction and the archive. With Elleke Boehmer, she founded the Southern Lives Network in 2020, and co-edited the forthcoming essay collection Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere: Texts, Spaces, Resonances.

Recent research includes Ibali, which explored narratives of educational inclusion in Nigeria, South Africa, and the UK through a creative, collaborative storytelling process. She is developing a monograph that explores shapes, forms, rhythms, and repetition in the process, and will be publishing on the ethics of story-making as a creative practice in the forthcoming collection Ethics in Practice as Research: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. She is a Co-Investigator on the Wellcome Trust funded project Leading Across Boundaries.

She is also a poet, with work in Propel Magazine, The Rialto, bath magg, Shearsman Magazine, and Finished Creatures, and the anthology Science of the Seas, among others. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Manchester Writing School. In 2022, her collaboration ‘They multiply their wings’, with composer Christopher Cook, won the Rosamond Prize and in 2023 her poem ‘Islands in silence’ was highly commended in the Plough Prize.