Kathleen Kete is the Borden W. Painter, Jr., '58/H'95 Professor of European History. She is the author of The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth -Century Paris and Making Way for Genius: The Aspiring Self in France from the Old Regime to the New  and has edited the volume on the nineteenth century in Bloomsbury's A Cultural History of Animals. With colleagues in Trinity's department of history she has developed a set of courses on the environment including a team-taught survey of 'Planet Earth' which explores the human experience of nature in its historical context, and a companion course 'Possible Earths' which has a pointed focus on our contemporary climate crisis. She also teaches a course on  'The  History of the Alps."  Her new book- The Alpine Enlightenment: Horace-Benedict de Saussure and Nature's Sensorium--  was published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press and is indebted both to these collegial forays in environmental history and to her research in the history of France and Francophone Europe.