Kaori has written extensively on animals, particularly in the contexts of the long nineteenth century, postcolonialism, and maritime studies. She is the author of Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire (2020) and the chief editor of Cosmopolitan Animals (2015). Kaori held a Caird Short-Term Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum, London, where she researched sea-faring rats. This research culminated in her edited volume, Maritime Animals: Ships, Species, Stories (2023), published as part of Penn State University Press's prestigious Animalibus series. She is also a founding member of the Kent Animal Humanities Network.
Currently, Kaori is leading an AHRC-funded Networking Project titled ‘Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis’ (June 2023-May 2025). This interdisciplinary initiative seeks to reexamine the relevance of nonhuman fables and develop innovative theories and practices of the genre in response to pressing environmental challenges.
Kaori also specialises in colonial discourses of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and is a leading scholar on the work of Rudyard Kipling. She is the author of Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (2006), and has edited, with an introduction and notes, Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills and the Jungle Books for Penguin Classics, and co-edited Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism (2010).
Kaori’s other research interests include cosmopolitanism, transnational networks, and migrant experiences. She has also researched on the Esperanto movement in Britain in the first decades of the 20th century (a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust). Another area of interest is literary and critical theory, and she has edited a special issue on ‘Dream Writing’ (2008).
Kaori would be happy to supervise doctoral research relating to animal studies and/or postcolonial studies. She'd be particularly keen to supervise in areas which touch on her current interests: animals, animal literature and theory, fables, the sea, empire, colonial fiction, global movements, cosmopolitanism, language and translation.
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