Dr Chris Mourant BA, MA, PhD

• Fellow, Higher Education Academy (2019)
• PhD, King’s College London (2015)
• BA and MA, University of Warwick (2009 and 2010)

I studied English Literature at the University of Warwick before completing my PhD at King’s College London (with a year abroad studying at the University of Stuttgart and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle). After working as a Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University, I joined the University of Birmingham in 2016. 

I enjoy introducing students to works of prose fiction, especially modernist literature.

In years gone by, I have designed and delivered the following specialist option modules:

• Modernism in the Magazines
• The Modern Short Story
• Single Author: Virginia Woolf.

I welcome enquires from prospective MRes and PhD students with research proposals relating to my areas of specialism.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I am a literary historian interested in the period 1880–1950. My research falls into three broad themes which often appear in combination: print culture and media history; empire and colonial modernity; and the transnational, global imaginaries of modernist writing.

I have published extensively on the life and work of New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), the subject of my first monograph. Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture (2019) examines the various ways in which Mansfield used her contributions to literary journals and modernist 'little magazines' to forge transnational identities and writing styles, and to pose challenging questions about the nationalist and imperialist foundations of modernity. Examining her ambivalent, precarious position as a colonial woman working within and against the London literary establishment, the book provides a new perspective on Mansfield as a 'colonial-metropolitan modernist' and proto-postcolonial writer. It also puts her work in dialogue with other contributors to these periodicals, such as Beatrice Hastings, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, and reveals the many different literary forms and modes of writing that Mansfield experimented with across her career. I am now President of the international Katherine Mansfield Society.

The fiction of E. M. Forster (1879-1970) is also a continuing research priority for me. For Cambridge University Press, I am producing a new edition of Forster's final novel, A Passage to India (1924).

My most recent research has focused on 'literatures of telecommunication' in the modernist period, examining how authors depicted the new kinds of intimacy and long-distance (dis)connection enabled by global communications infrastructures. This has resulted in published outputs on telephony and letter writing, and articles in preparation on telegraphy and wireless broadcasting.

I am president of the international Katherine Mansfield Society.

Previously, I have served as co-director of the Centre for Modernist Cultures at the University of Birmingham (2017–23), co-editor of the journal Modernist Cultures (2020–23), contributor of the section ‘Fiction 1900–30’ to The Year’s Work in English Studies (2021–23), and executive committee member of the British Association for Modernist Studies (2013–15, 2017–19).