For over a century, Katherine Mansfield’s writings have exported the waters of Wellington to an international readership. Deeply captivated by the coast now constituting the Taputeranga Marine Reserve, Mansfield wrote ‘I am at the sea—at Island Bay, in fact—lying flat on my face on the warm white sand. And before me the sea stretches.’ The waters of Island Bay were influential for Mansfield, helping to generate her stories. 

Focusing on literary representations of water, my PhD research investigates the ways bodies of water both affect authors and appear in their texts—particularly highlighting the centrality of Wellington’s coastal waters to Mansfield’s uniquely fluid narrative structure. I’m also researching Mansfield’s watery writing in relation to the works of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop and the British novelist Virginia Woolf. As I write on the ways watery places affected these writers, I find frequenting those same places myself invaluable. I studied Bishop during my undergraduate degree in the United States, Woolf during my master’s degree in the United Kingdom, and am now studying Mansfield here in Wellington. 

I’m also interested in unifying the voices of scientific and artistic communities to combat our planet’s worsening and catastrophic marine damage. Improving public narratives about the waterbodies that surround us—and our profound interconnectedness with them—will become more and more crucial, as people value what they can understand and relate to.