Kathleen Kete

Associate professor and chair of the department of history at Trinity College in Hartford, she is the author of The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (1994) and editor of A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire (2007). She is completing a book on the problem of ambition in post-revolutionary France examining the plight of individuals caught between traditional attitudes towards competition, and on the rising tide of a new regime marked by the opportunities of the first empire and restoration. Her new work is a study of Saussure’s Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–1796), a text where geology, botany, and meteorology combine with romanticism to present one of the most intriguingpage-turners of the age.