Professor Kai Easton completed her doctoral thesis on the South African-Australian Nobel Prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee at SOAS University of London, where she subsequently taught from 2006-22, following appointments at the universities of Sussex and Rhodes and an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide and an Honorary Researcher in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN, Durban, and has held a Henry Charles Chapman Fellowship at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, two Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowships at the University of Texas – Austin, and an ASH Mobilities Fellowship at the University of Adelaide. She served for many years as a trustee of the South Africa – UK NGO Canon Collins Trust (2009-21) and continues to serve on their Advisory Board for postgraduate scholarships.

Her creative-critical research and teaching is strongly interdisciplinary, traversing literary, historical and visual archives, travelling cultures and geographies of the South.

Recent work includes three exhibitions: Scenes from the South, a major collaboration across three countries and four institutions to celebrate J. M. Coetzee’s 80th birthday (co-curated with David Attwell) at Amazwi South African National Museum and featuring in the National Arts Festival in South Africa in 2020 and 2022. This was followed by an Australian variation in 2024 (co-curated with David Ishaya Osu and Meg Samuelson), bringing together archives, photographs and texts of two Nobel Laureates, J. M. Coetzee and Abdulrazak Gurnah, and comprising a companion exhibition, Zanzibar Views, for the 150th Anniversary celebrations of the University of Adelaide in collaboration with the History Trust of South Australia. Hosted by the South Australian Maritime Museum, the exhibition featured in the History Festival of South Australia and a unique series of events, ‘Speaking from the South’ in May-June 2024.

In addition to Scenes from the South, she curated Navigating the War, an exhibition to mark the centenary of the legendary British navigator and single-handed sailor Michael Richey (Georgetown University Library, 2017) and Waves of Navigation (2022, co-curated with Hannah Sherrard) to mark the 75th anniversary of the Royal Institute of Navigation (of which Richey was its first and most long-serving Director), and for which she was awarded the J.E.D Williams Medal in 2023. Other recent work includes the edited collections, J. M. Coetzee & the Archive (with Marc Farrant and Hermann Wittenberg, Bloomsbury, 2021) and Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal (with Derek Attridge, Routledge, 2017).

As an undergraduate, she read French at university, including, whilst living in the French countryside, a semester at the Université de Haute Bretagne in Rennes. She is currently working on an essay film, Roads of France (with Rick Barney, J. M. Coetzee, David Attwell and Luke Harrald). Looking at questions of home, place and the poetics of cycling, it explores the cycling routes Coetzee has created over some 30 years of riding the roads of southwestern France.