Kate Lilley is an Honorary Associate Professor in the Discipline of English and Writing within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. She completed her PhD at the University of London in 1988 with a thesis titled 'To dy in writinge: figure and narrative in masculine elegy,' following undergraduate studies at the University of Sydney. From 1986 to 1989, Lilley held a postdoctoral research fellowship at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she worked on seventeenth-century women's writing. She joined the University of Sydney in 1990, achieving tenure after several years and serving for 31 years as a full-time faculty member. During her tenure, she was Associate Professor of English, Director of the Creative Writing program from 2013 to 2021, and contributed to the department's research and teaching in poetry and literary studies.

Lilley's academic research focuses on early modern women's writing, queer feminist poetics, and intermedia texts, including poem/screen relations. Key scholarly works include Blazing Worlds: Seventeenth-Century Women’s Utopian Writing (1992), The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World and Other Writings edited by Lilley (1992; Penguin Classics, 1994), True State Within: Women's Elegy, 1640-1740 (1992), and articles such as 'Fruits of Sodom: The Critical Erotics of Early Modern Women's Writing' (Parergon, 2012), 'Contracting Readers: “Margaret Newcastle” and the Rhetoric of Conjugality' (2018), and 'Katherine Philips, “Philo-Philippa” and the Poetics of Association' (2014). As a poet, she has published Versary (Salt, 2002; winner of the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry), Ladylike (UWA Publishing, 2012), Round Vienna (Vagabond Press, 2011), and Tilt (Vagabond Press, 2018; winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Poetry, 2019). Lilley edited Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett (UWA Press, 2010) and serves as poetry editor for the journal Southerly. Her work has earned additional recognition, including the Henry Lawson Prize from the University of Sydney in 1982.

Professional Email: kate.lilley@sydney.edu.au