Diana Holmes

Profile

I studied at the University of Sussex, then went to Paris (Paris III) to write a maitrise (M.A) on the Resistance writer Vercors, before returning to Sussex for a PhD on  'Images of women in the inter-war French novel'. Having discovered the joys of teaching as well as researching, I applied for academic jobs and taught first at what was then the Polytechnic, Wolverhampton, with an intermitted period part-timing at North London Poly and Ealing (later Thames Valley), before joining Keele University in 1992 as Senior Lecturer then Professor of French. I came to Leeds in September 1999, which coincided with the award of a Leverhulme Fellowship to support the writing of a monograph on Rachilde, the only woman writer of the fin-de-siècle Decadent movement (see publications).

My specialist teaching has been on women writers and on French cinema, and at Leeds I also contributed to the successful development of the Centre for World Cinemas. From 2018 to 2021 I was also Honorary Professor at the University of Nottingham. I have served on the executive committees of the major French Studies scholarly and professional associations, chaired the national Gapper Book Prize 2008–10, and am currently President of the Society for French Studies.  I have been one of the organisers of the 'Women In French' feminist network since it was founded in 1988. In 1998 I was awarded the Chevalier dans l’ordre des palmes académiques, for services to French culture, and in 2023 was honoured to be awarded the status of Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.  

Research interests

It was when I came to embark on a PhD that I realised to what extent ‘literature’, especially in France, was largely synonymous with ‘writing by men’. The final chapter of my thesis is devoted to Colette: my first monograph was then a study of her work, and women’s writing became my main field of research, with an emphasis on the period from late 19th century to the present, on social and cultural context, and on what women read. Interest in readership and the social impact of the novel has also meant that my definition of literature includes mass-market or popular fiction. Projects with colleagues at Leeds  led to the production of a major study of Popular Culture in France (Imagining the Popular, co-edited with David Looseley), and to seminars, a conference, a journal Special issue and an edited book on popular fictions (with David Platten, and our French partners the Litteratures Populaires et Cultures Mediatiques group). My latest monograph is on the middlebrow – that is, the page-turner that deals with serious issues, the mainstream novel that attracts large readerships but rather less critical esteem. Recent conference papers and work in progress deal with representations of ageing by women writers, (a return to) how love and romance are imagined in contemporary narrative fiction, once famous and now forgotten women writers of the Belle Epoque, and ‘postfeminism'.

Through teaching, I also came to a secondary research interest in cinema, and co-wrote a study of the cinema of Francois Truffaut (Manchester University Press, 1998). I co-edit the French Film Directors series (Manchester University Press) in which this volume appeared; the series is large and growing, with almost 50 volumes already published and several more in preparation. I have also written on the stardom of Brigitte Bardot, on the relationship between entertainment and ideology in film, and on gender and the French New Wave. I am currently working on the only French woman film director of the period 1940s-50s, Jacqueline Audry, and in particular her film adaptations of novels by Colette, notes and introduction for a new translation of some Colette novels, and a chapter on romance for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in French. 

In December 2023 I was one of the speakers on Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time programme (BBC Radio 4), on the subject of Colette. At the French Institute’s Beyond Words Festival in London, May 2023, I interviewed Leslie Caron, star of the musical Gigi (adapted from a story by Colette), and chaired a round table on Colette’s  work with novelists Deborah Levy and Michele Roberts. https://beyondwordslitfest.co.uk/colette-by-deborah-levy-michele-roberts-emmanuelle-lambert-diana-holmes/ . In November 2023, I will be one of the speakers at a public event on the work of Colette hosted by the New York Maison française and the University of New York.

Research groups and institutes

• Gender
• Popular culture
• Digital cultures
• Literary studies
• French
• Centre for World Literatures

Student education

Research supervision

I have supervised 8 PhDs and 4 MAs by Research to successful completion. I have examined 40 doctoral theses since 1991,12 of these from  countries beyond the UK including France, Norway, Sweden, Canada, Austrlalia and Ireland. In 2018 I received an ‘Outstanding Faculty Mentor’ award from the association Women in French Studies (US). I am happy to supervise students who want to work on popular fiction, women writers, feminism, cinema, reader reception – all of these either within French Studies or from a comparative perspective.