Kaye Mitchell

Dr. Kaye Mitchell is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature within the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. She serves as Co-Director of the Centre for New Writing and is affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture. Her academic career spans over fifteen years at Manchester, following previous teaching at the University of Westminster.

Her educational background includes a BA in English Literature from Queen Mary University of London, an MA in Philosophy from Birkbeck, and a PhD from Birkbeck completed in 2004. She has held visiting positions including a Visiting Scholar at NYU in 2011 and an 18-month Humboldt Experienced Research Fellowship in Berlin from 2014-2015.

Dr. Mitchell's research focuses on contemporary literature with particular emphasis on gender and sexuality studies, literary theory, and experimental writing by women. Her work explores the relationships between form, meaning, and gender/sexual identity and representation. She has published extensively on topics including literary intention, women's experimental writing, and the politics and poetics of shame in contemporary literature. She is currently working on a monograph titled Gendered Experiments which analyzes gender ramifications of literary experiment through strategies of appropriation, constraint, and excess.

Her research output shows a consistent trajectory toward increasingly specialized work on women's writing, gender, and experimental literary forms. The publications demonstrate interdisciplinary connections between literary studies, gender theory, and affect studies, with particular attention to how negative affects like shame operate within contemporary literary texts.

• Humboldt Experienced Research Fellowship (2014-2015)
• Co-Editor of Contemporary Women's Writing (OUP journal)
• Member of editorial boards for Open Gender Journal and C21

Dr. Mitchell actively supervises PhD students working on diverse topics spanning gender studies, contemporary literature, and experimental writing. Her external engagement includes talks at major festivals and events including Ladyfest Manchester, Queer Up North, Homotopia, and the Manchester Literature Festival. She also participates in the annual Sexuality Summer School through her affiliation with the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture.