Professor Schaffer was President of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia, a member of the Australian Women's Studies Association and the Cultural Studies Association of Australia and served on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Continuum, and Hecate.
In 2002, after her retirement, Professor Schaffer became an Adjunct Professor in the Gender Studies program, School of Social Sciences, University of Adelaide. In the first half of 2003 Professor Schaffer took up an ANU, Humanities Research Centre Fellowship and a visiting position at Curtin University (with her colleague Prof. Sidonie Smith) in order to complete a monograph entitled Narrated Lives: Storytelling and the Politics of Human Rights. She received an ARC grant (2003-5) that studied narratives of identity, alienation and belonging in contemporary South Africa and Australia. Kay Schaffer's research areas included cultural studies, postcolonial and global formations, and life writing and the study of the relationships between gender, race, and nation formation.
Works published by Kay Schaffer before 1983 were published under the name Kay Iseman.
