Chris Mourant

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 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.