Placing Katherine Mansfield
University of Birmingham
1–3 July 2025
Keynote speakers:
Lauren Elkin (‘Mansfield Walking the City’) and Andrew Harrison (‘Mansfield in the Midlands’)
With a special performance from musician Stepha Schweiger
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
Abstracts of no more than 250 words, together with a 50-word biographical sketch, should be sent to kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org before 1 February 2025.
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/