Katherine is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. She previously studied at Dalhousie University and the University of Saskatchewan. Her current research focuses on representations of contagious disease in Canadian literature after the HIV/AIDs pandemic. The project has one foot in literary studies, exploring the boundary-crossing energy of contagion as a literary device used to examine community membership, and the other in interdisciplinary health humanities, considering how lived understandings of infection and otherness are reflected and importantly refracted in literature. She has taught, researched, and been generally enthusiastic about literature, health humanities, and undergraduate writing.