Kat Hill is an author & researcher based in the Highlands of Scotland.
Her work focuses on questions of landscape, people, and heritage in various contexts from the bothies of the Scottish Highlands to non-conformist religious communities such as Mennonites in Europe, America and the Global South.
She is the author of the prize-winning book, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585 (Oxford University Press, 2015) and her second book, Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter was released with William Collins in Spring 2024. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing.
Kat has a PhD from the University of Oxford (2011) and is a Fellow at the IAS, Princeton University for 2024-25. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including awards from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and IASH at Edinburgh University. She lectured at Oxford, UEA and Birkbeck College for ten years before London for a life in Scotland to write and research. She currently works as a freelance writer and is a fellow at the IAS in Princeton.
She is a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt and a European champion.
Bothy
In Search of Simple Shelter
A stirring book for anyone who longs to run away to the woods sometimes.
You will find a bothy in the mountains or the wilderness, remote huts you can’t reserve, usually without electricity or other mod-cons, running water or a marker on the map. In this beautiful journey, Kat Hill travels between numerous bothies – across Scotland, England and Wales – revealing the beauty of these wild shelters, their history, the stories of the people who frequent them and the core of why we all crave escaping into the remote. Weaving in her own story of heartbreak and new purpose, her historian’s perspective and brilliant, fresh consideration of the environment and what we owe to it, this is a glorious book of adventure and peace, wilderness and refuge. Read more here.
Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany
Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585
When Martin Luther mounted his challenge to the Catholic Church, reform stimulated a range of responses, including radical solutions such as those proposed by theologians of the Anabaptist movement. But how did ordinary Anabaptists, men and women, grapple with the theological and emotional challenges of the Lutheran Reformation? Anabaptism developed along unique lines in the Lutheran heartlands in central Germany, where the movement was made up of scattered groups and did not centre on charismatic leaders as it did elsewhere. Ideas were spread more often by word of mouth than by print, and many Anabaptists had uneven attachment to the movement, recanting and then relapsing. Historiography has neglected Anabaptism in this area, since it had no famous leaders and does not seem to have been numerically strong. Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief challenges these assumptions, revealing how Anabaptism's development in central Germany was fundamentally influenced by its interaction with Lutheran theology. In doing so, it sets a new agenda for understandings of Anabaptism in central Germany, as ordinary individuals created new forms of piety which mingled ideas about brotherhood, baptism, the Eucharist, and gender and sex. Anabaptism in this region was not an isolated sect but an important part of the confessional landscape of the Saxon lands, and continued to shape Lutheran pastoral affairs long after scholarship assumed it had declined. The choices these Anabaptist men and women made sat on a spectrum of solutions to religious concerns raised by the Reformation. Understanding their decisions, therefore, provides new insights into how religious identities were formed in the Reformation era.