Placing Katherine Mansfield

 

University of Birmingham

1–3 July 2025

 

Keynote speakers:

 

Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford) ‘Mansfield through southern space’

Lauren Elkin (writer and translator) ‘Katherine Mansfield’s urban ambivalence’

Andrew Harrison (University of Nottingham) ‘From Days Bay to the River Soar: Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence and
“Unspoken Intimacy” in The Rainbow (1915)

 

LINK TO THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE HERE

 

Katherine Mansfield once wrote ‘How hard it is to escape from places […] — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — little rags and shreds of your very life’. Mansfield’s journeys ‘From the other side of the world / From a little island cradled in the giant sea bosom’ indelibly shaped the form and content of her writing, and the places that she visited and in which she settled throughout Europe exerted a lasting influence on her.

The 2025 conference of the Katherine Mansfield Society will re-examine the importance of place in Mansfield’s writings, while also asking: how do we ‘place’ Mansfield today? How do we situate her work in current critical conversations and against new scholarly debates?

 

Proposals are invited from researchers at all career stages for individual 20-minute presentations. Suggested topics might include (but are not limited to):

  • KM’s association with specific places (Wellington, London, Fontainebleau, etc.)
  • KM, the city, and metropolitan urban experience
  • KM, the countryside, nature, and non-human worlds
  • KM, locality, and regional identity
  • KM, the Midlands, and D. H. Lawrence
  • KM, borders, and boundary-crossing
  • KM, houses, and belonging
  • KM and suburbia
  • KM, travel, and impermanent/temporary residences (hotels, guesthouses, etc.)
  • KM and contemporary literary theory and criticism

 

All members of the Katherine Mansfield Society will be eligible to pay a reduced conference fee, with significantly reduced rates available to postgraduate members. To become a member of the society, please visit https://katherinemansfieldsociety.org/join-the-kms/