Kate Rossmanith

Kate Rossmanith is an academic and a nonfiction writer. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree and a PhD from the University of Sydney, Australia. Kate's background is in Performance Studies, which combines theatre and anthropology, and investigates how we perform ourselves in everyday life. This has laid the grounding for her criminology research that examines people's enactments in the courtroom, in particular enactments of remorse. She is the author of a creative nonfiction book Small Wrongs (Hardie Grant Books 2018) that explores remorse in the criminal justice system and remorse in our everyday personal lives. Small Wrongs has been nominated for literary awards in the UK and Australia.

Kate is part of a research team exploring the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence, and she has collaborated with anthropologists from the University of Oxford to examine the ways in which offenders on parole connect with mainstream groups.

Kate also researches creative writing, specifically the intersections between nonfiction, memoir and ethnography. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Monthly and Best Australian Essays 2007. Her essays about the people who work, and find themselves caught up, in the criminal justice system have been used to teach the community about sentencing and parole processes, and have informed the working practices of judges and parole authorities. In 2018 her short documentary 'Unnatural Deaths' was published by The Guardian as part of a series exploring archives on film. Kate is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, Australia.