Kaye Mitchell - Lecturer in Contemporary Literature
Kaye Mitchell's research is mainly in contemporary literature and culture, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality, critical theory and narratology.
Following a BA English Literature (QMUL) and MA Philosophy (Birkbeck), she completed a PhD at Birkbeck which examined diverse theories of intention, literary meaning and authorship. A book based on her thesis is due from Continuum in 2008. She then taught for several years at the University of Westminster, before joining The University of Manchester in 2007.
Her most recent research has included a book on the fiction of A.L. Kennedy (Palgrave 2007) and chapters and articles on late twentieth century and contemporary writers including B.S. Johnson and Alan Hollinghurst. She has burgeoning interests in popular fiction, the relationship between gender and genre, and the dialogue between the creative and the critical.
Kaye is currently adapting a conference paper on 50s pulp fiction for a collection on feminism and popular culture, and planning her next major project, tentatively entitled Unintelligible Desire. This will investigate the posited relationship between sexuality and signification in a range of contemporary writings, both fictional and theoretical, looking particularly at accounts and representations of the perverse, the masochistic and the queer.
She is part of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy, a Marxist and Feminist journal, and would be interested in supervising doctoral research in the areas of contemporary fiction and culture, gender and sexuality studies and critical theory. Kaye is course director for the MA Contemporary Literature and Culture, which will be accepting students from September 2008, and welcomes inquiries from potential applicants to that programme.