Gerri Kimber

Dr Gerri Kimber is a Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Gerri studied for her BA Hons at the University of Birmingham and her PhD at the University of Exeter. Her research focus has two main strands: early-twentieth-century literary modernism, and in particular Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury group, and postcolonial studies. Other research interests and publications focus on reception and translation studies, textual studies, the short story, the fin-de-siècle, and children’s literature. Gerri is a world expert on Katherine Mansfield, having to date written or edited 40+ volumes on the author. She is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies, the peer-reviewed annual yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society, published by Edinburgh University Press. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (2016), Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2015), and Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008). She is the Series Editor of the 4-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012–16). Together with Claire Davison, she is currently editing a new 4-volume edition of Katherine Mansfield’s complete letters for EUP (2020–25). Gerri is also co-editor of the following volumes: Katherine Mansfield: International Approaches (London: Routledge, 2022); Brigid Brophy: Avant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist (2020), Katherine Mansfield: New Directions (2020), Re-forming World Literature: Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Short Story (2018), The Collected Poetry of Katherine Mansfield (2016) Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives (2016), Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe: Influences and Connections (2015), Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (2011) and Essays in French Studies (2007). She has contributed chapters to many further volumes, in addition to numerous journal articles and reviews, notably for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has featured on the cover of the TLS eleven times, most recently with her review of a new biography of D. H. Lawrence. She has also recorded two associated podcasts for the TLS.

Gerri was Chair of the International Katherine Mansfield Society for ten years (2010–20) and co-organised numerous Mansfield conferences and events. She devised and coordinated the annual Katherine Mansfield Society Birthday Lecture for ten years, held in London every October. Due to her international reputation as a Mansfield scholar, Gerri has made numerous media appearances on national radio and television in both New Zealand and the UK and has been invited as a keynote speaker all over the world, including Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, Slovakia, Belgium, France, Germany and the UK. Gerri was the Alexander Turnbull Library Research Fellow at the National Library of New Zealand in 2015, and a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow in 2015, at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2014 she received a Society of Authors, Authors’ Foundation Award. Also in 2014, she was runner-up for the title of UK New Zealander of the Year, for her services to New Zealand culture. The Virginia Woolf Society asked her to deliver their prestigious annual birthday lecture in January 2024. Gerri has recently been commissioned to write a new biography of Katherine Mansfield for Reaktion Books.