Kaye Mitchell

My most recent monograph, Writing Shame, published in early 2020, investigates the triangular relationship between shame, gender and writing, via readings of an array of contemporary texts - literary, popular, fictional and autofictional. In Writing Shame I start from the premise that femininity and shame are utterly and necessarily imbricated, and I examine writing that explores and inhabits - rather than seeking to overcome - this state of shame, considering the dissonant effects of such explorations on and beyond the page. I received an Experienced Researcher Fellowship from the Alexander Von Humboldt foundation to support the research and writing for Writing Shame, and from 2014-2015 was based in Berlin. I have also been a Visiting Scholar at NYU in New York (in 2010) and I held a Guest Professorship at the University of Bamberg, Germany, in February 2023.

My current interests lie particularly in experimental writing by women: a special issue on contemporary women's experimental writing for Contemporary Women's Writing was published in 2015; a chapter on realism and experimentalism in postwar women's writing formed part of the History of British Women's Writing, Vol IX, 1945-1975, which was published by Palgrave in 2016; in 2019 Edinburgh University Press published British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s, which I co-edited with Nonia Williams. My new monograph project, Gendered Experiments, analyses the gender ramifications of three areas/strategies of literary experiment: appropriation, constraint, and transgression, through analyses of a range of texts by women from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I am Co-Editor of the OUP journal, Contemporary Women's Writing, a member of the editorial board of Open Gender Journal (in Germany), and a series editor of Bloomsbury's 'Contemporary Critical Perspectives' series.