Katie Wright is an Associate Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University. She has recently completed an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) (2014–2019).
Katie’s current work focuses on historical child abuse inquiries, changing conceptualisations of childhood, and the cultural shift towards openness and disclosure. She has a longstanding research interest in understanding the complex and contradictory effects of the spread of psychological expertise, both historically and in the present.
In 2017 she was a Visiting Guest Scholar in the Department of Child Studies at Linköping University in Sweden.
Since 2009, Katie has held three consecutive and prestigious research fellowships: an ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2009–2012); a University of Melbourne Fellowship (2013–2014); and an ARC DECRA (2014–2019).
Katie has wide ranging teaching experience in both undergraduate and graduate courses and is currently supervising theses in the areas of Autistic representation, the effects of parental incarceration, self-advocacy groups in the domain of historical abuse and the history of ideas about transgression.
She is on the Associate Editorial Board of the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association (BSA), Sociology, and is a member of the Australian Sociological Association (TASA) and the International Sociological Association (ISA). She leads the La Trobe University HuSS Research Cluster, ‘Wellbeing: Critical Social Perspectives’ and is the Research Leader for the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University.