From Mark Harris
Although we had all known Katherine had been seriously ill for some time, the news of her passing came as a very nasty blow. It meant having to accept the reality of her illness.
I was appointed to the School a year after Katherine in 2000, and remember lucidly meeting her over lunch in my first semester and talking about her work on persistence. Her warmth and intellectual strengths were immediately apparent. With Peter Clark as Head of School we were promoted to Senior Lecturer and both won Philip Leverhulme Prizes in 2004. When Katherine became Head of School in 2009 I was Head of Social Anthropology. There were numerous challenging situations, sometimes we agreed, and at others we didn’t. At that time, Katherine employed a very effective device for ending our conversations – she would look at me, not say anything, and wait for me to realise my time was up. Silence was a very effective way of bringing the conversation to an end and putting me in my place. There was nothing unfriendly here.
My last conversation with her was, bizarrely, an annual academic review in February this year. It was then I realised that this silence may have been the way Katherine tried to listen to what really mattered, and to get beyond the noise of daily problems. We talked about her research on impostor syndrome and how she wanted to take the focus away from individual self-doubt to hostile social environments and cultural representations. I asked her if the topics on which she had done her research were all connected; to me they were all quite personal and intimate (e.g. trust, personal persistence and the feeling of being somewhere you did not belong). Katherine quickly put me right, and, in my non-philosophical place, again: there was no connection, and the topics had no personal aspect to them. Nevertheless, I would like to think that her work, especially on impostor syndrome, was the outcome not only of her learning and scholarship, but of listening to people very carefully over many years. Squirrelling away her thoughts on particular problems, she came round to make sense of what she had heard in her own way. She had such great sensibility and sensitivity to her fellow beings. Now I wonder whether her silence was less a way of dismissing me but an openness to waiting for me to say something important.
A week after her death was announced some members of the School went for a walk. Jon came along accompanied by Rebecca for support. At the end of the walk, we stood around in a circle listening to Jon giving a truly touching and remarkable speech about Katherine. He wanted to let colleagues know that Katherine always spoke very lovingly of her colleagues. Indeed, she had no desire to work anywhere else because she valued our collegiality above all in her working life. Once again Katherine was looking over us as we were mourning her loss. I am left wondering how St Andrews will be without her. Her silence remains and I will use it to remember the things that really are important in my life. Thank you, Katherine.