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)

Educated in the comprehensive system, 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 the Sorbonne, Paris). After working as a Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University, I joined the University of Birmingham in 2016. 

I am the Director of the MA English Literature programme and I teach widely across the discipline, from nineteenth-century to contemporary literature. 

In 2021/22, I am delivering teaching and lectures on the following modules:

• LC Prose
• LH Single Author: Virginia Woolf
• LM Modernism
• LM Research Skills for English Literature 

Previously, I have delivered the specialist LH/LM modules Modernism in the Magazines, The Modern Short Story, and Orwell’s Books: Writing Politics, Resisting Tyranny. 

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In 2018 and 2019, students nominated me for the College of Arts and Law Outstanding Teaching Award.

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 research twentieth-century prose fiction, with particular emphasis on modernism, empire and transnationalism, periodical studies and media history, and textual scholarship.

In my first monograph, Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture (EUP 2019), I returned to the venues in which the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield first published the majority of her work: that is, literary journals and modernist 'little magazines'. The project had two principal aims: firstly, to reveal Mansfield's prodigious output and the sheer variety of literary forms and genres she adopted and adapted across her writing career; and secondly, to situate Mansfield's work within the networks of influence facilitated by periodicals and magazines. Reading Mansfield in dialogue with writers such as Beatrice Hastings, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, the book examines the often ambivalent, precarious position Mansfield occupied in metropolitan writing communities, as a colonial woman working both within and against the male London literary establishment. I have presented my research on Mansfield to wider audiences in the Times Literary Supplement and on BBC Radio 4, and a video of me talking about this project is available to view here.

My other recent book publication is a co-edited essay collection, The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880–1950 (EUP 2021). 

My research interests in book history, print culture and the materiality of the text have also brought me to the practice of textual scholarship. I am currently editing A Passage to India (1924) for The Cambridge Edition of the Fictions of E. M. Forster (general editor: Howard Booth), and I will edit a volume of Ford Madox Ford's collected short stories for the OUP edition of his complete works (general editors: Max Saunders and Sara Haslam). 

I am a co-editor of the journal Modernist Cultures and the contributor of the section surveying scholarship on ‘Fiction 1900–1930’ to The Year’s Work in English Studies.

Together with my colleague Nathan Waddell, I co-direct the Centre for Modernist Cultures (CMC) at the University of Birmingham. I am also an active member of the Centre for Literary Editing and the Materiality of the Text (CLEMT), the Midlands-based Periodicals and Print Culture Research Group (PPCRG), the international Katherine Mansfield Society (KMS), and the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS). I served on the BAMS executive committee for several years, first as Postgraduate Representative and then as ECR Representative. In these roles, I co-organised the major international conferences ‘Modernism Now!’ (London, 2014) and ‘Modernist Life’ (Birmingham, 2017).