In May 2019, Catherine Rowett made history by becoming the first Green Party MEP elected in the East of England (which covers Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Essex and Bedfordshire), joining a group of seven British Green MEPs who were returned to the European Parliament.
Before taking up her current office as MEP for the East of England, Catherine Rowett was a professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, a position she took up in 2003. She has previously held posts at the University of Liverpool and Swansea University in South Wales.
Catherine is cited the world over for her influential research on Presocratic philosophy, Aristotle, and Plato (including some key publications on Plato’s political and economic ideas in the Republic). She has published seven books, one of which (her popular pocket book called Presocratic Philosophy: a very short introduction) has also been translated into both Modern Greek and Portuguese.
Before becoming an MEP, Catherine was active for many years locally and regionally in Green Party politics. She has been a lifelong believer in the importance of changing things at the political level in order to solve the crises facing us on this planet, to achieve a fairer distribution of resources and to prevent the global problems that we face because of the fact that the super-rich hold all the power and all the wealth.
Currently she works with 75 members of other Green parties across Europe, to deliver radical and visionary corrections to existing and emerging EU policies. In her work at home and in Brussels, she aims to address a range of issues in connection with transport, agriculture, fishing, fair taxation, aviation, and energy, as well as key issues relating to migration, refugees, religious persecution and the increasing threats to human rights and democracy within and beyond the EU.