Kete is associate professor of history at Trinity College in Connecticut. She is the author of The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (1994) and editor of A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire (2007). She has just completed a history of ambition in France entitled \"Making Way for Genius: The Aspiring Self in France from the Old Regime to the New.\" Her current research is focused on the Alps. She is exploring Saussure\'s Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–1796) and the mixture of scientific and literary description (similar to that of naturalist-explorers of Africa and the Pacific) which Saussure and others deploy to bring this still-exotic mountain region to the attention of European elites.
