Katherine Mansfield Conference 2025

Placing Katherine Mansfield

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? 

Confirmed keynote speakers include author and translator Dr Lauren Elkin, Professor Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford), and Dr Andrew Harrison (University of Nottingham). 

Registration

Registration is now open via the button at the top right of this webpage. Our fee structure is as below:

• £60 for Student/Unwaged members of the Katherine Mansfield Society
• £90 for all other student/unwaged delegates
• £120 for Standard members of the Katherine Mansfield Society 
• £160 for all other delegates 

To become a member of the Katherine Mansfield Society, please visit this webpage.

Conference dinner 

There is the option to attend a conference dinner on Wednesday 2 July at Chung Ying Cantonese Restaurant in Birmingham city centre. The deadline to register for the dinner is Saturday 10 May and payment of a £5 deposit is required (payable at the point of registration). Attendees will have the option to choose either a £28 set menu or £27 vegan set menu.

Programme

Please click here to download a copy of the provisional conference programme.

Getting to the University of Birmingham

The University of Birmingham is situated in Edgbaston, just three miles from Birmingham city centre. It is well served by public transport services, including its on train station.

Find out more about travelling to the University by public transport, bicycle, car, or air.

Venue

The conference will take place in the University House (Business School) on Tuesday July 1st - O3 on our campus map in the orange zone, and then the Old Gym building on Wednesday 2nd to Thursday 3rd July building - Y1 on the campus map in our yellow zone. You can find them via our online and downloadable maps of the campus available here.

Accessibility

Information about building accessibility for the Arts building is available on our AccessAble guide.

If you cannot find the information you need or have other access requirements or need reasonable accommodations, please get in touch with the conference organisers at m.clulee@bham.ac.uk

Accommodation

Please see the Visit Birmingham website to explore accommodation options across the city. Trains from Birmingham New Street station in the city centre run regularly to our university train station, taking around 7 minutes. Taxis from the city centre to main campus would take around 15-20 minutes dependent on traffic.

The University does have a hotel on campus Edgbaston Park Hotel and Conference Centre.  It is likely to be booked for our conference dates, but if you wanted to see if there were any places available please contact reservations@edgbastonparkhotel.com or call 0121 414 8888 for best rates.

Conference organiser

Dr Chris Mourant, Lecturer in Early Twentieth-Century English Literature, Department of English Literature