Diana Holmes

Profile

Since 2024 I have been Professor Emerita of French, no longer teaching but still actively researching and publishing. In the course of my full-time academic career, I taught from 1999 to 2024 at Leeds, after under-and post-graduate studies at the University of Sussex and Paris III and previous appointments at Wolverhampton Poly (as it then was) and the University of Keele. I externalled at many universities, was Honorary Professor at the University of Nottingham (2018-21), and was President and Vice President of the Society for French Studies from 2021-25. In the late 1980s I was one of the founders of the feminist scholarly network Women in French UK-Ireland, and remain an active participant. I have supervised 10 PhDs to successful conclusion, as well as a number of MAs by research,and externally examined 40 PhDs in the UK, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Canada and Australia.

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

My books are mainly on French women writers and the place of fiction reading in women’s lives. I have always been interested in what people read for pleasure, hence in popular and ‘middlebrow’ novels as well as the more experimental and ‘literary’. They are, in chronological order:

Colette (Macmillan, 1991)
French Women Writers 1848-1994 (Athlone, Women in Context Series, 1996)
Rachilde – Decadence Gender and the Woman Writer (Berg, 2001)
Romance and Readership in Twentieth-Century France: Love Stories (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Middlebrow Matters: women, stories and the hierarchy of culture in France since the Belle Époque. (Liverpool University Press, 2018) Winner of the MLA SCAGLIONE PRIZE FOR FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES, 2019.

And among my edited and co-edited books:

- A ‘Belle Epoque’? Women in French Society and Culture 1890-1914 (Berghahn, 2005), with Carrie Tarr
- Stardom in Postwar France (Berghahn 2007), with John Gaffney.
- Women, Genre and Circumstance: essays in memory of Elizabeth Fallaize, with Margaret Atack, Diana Knight, Judith Still (Legenda, 2012)
- Imagining the Popular: highbrow, lowbrow and middlebrow in contemporary French culture, with David Looseley (Manchester University Press, 2013)
- Making Waves: French Feminisms and their Legacies 1975-2015, with Margaret Atack, Alison Fell, Imogen Long (Liverpool University Press, 2019).

- Introduction à l’oeuvre de Daniel Lesueur “Conscience féminine, élève la voix ! » , ed. Diana Holmes and Martine Reid, Honoré Champion 2023.

In film studies, François Truffaut (Manchester University Press, 1998) co-authored with Robert Ingram – one of the 50 volumes in the French Film Directors series which I co-founded and edited with Robert Ingram and have now passed on to new editors.

I have also published a large number of articles and chapters. Some selected recent publications:

Postfeminism à la Française, Special issue of Nottingham French Studies December 2022 (Introduction + article ‘Women’s Fiction in Postfeminist France: Léonora Miano, Camille Laurens, and Chick-lit or romances urbaines’).

Françoise Sagan in the Literary Encyclopaedia Volume 1.5.2.06: French Writing and Culture: 2026.

- ‘La Vagabonde assise – space, place and the meaning of home in Colette and other women writers’, French Cultural Studies, Volume 34, Issue 1, February 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221144368
- ‘Modelling age - ageing women writers and their readers (Annie Ernaux, Margaret Drabble)’, French Studies Volume 75, No. 4, October 2023.
- ‘Jacqueline Audry’s Colette films: Postwar Quality Style with a Feminist Edge’ in French Screen Studies, Volume 25 Issue 1-2, October 2024, https://doi.org/10.1080/26438941.2024.2407238
- ‘A different story: bi-sexuality and bi-gendering in Colette’s coming-of-age stories’ in Tropelías – revista de la teoría de la literatura y la litérature comparada , Num.43, 2025, https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/tropelias/issue/view/637

- ‘Un rendez-vous manqué? Femmes de lettres et revues littéraires à la Belle Époque’ in Amélie Auzoux, Camille Koskas et Élisabeth Russo : Des Revues et des femmes : La place des femmes dans les revues littéraires de la Belle Époque jusqu’à la fin des années 1950 (Paris : Honoré Champion, 2022), pp.31-42.
- ‘Colette and the other woman’ in Disruptive Discourses by Francophone Women, ed. Polly Galis, Ciara Gorman, and Julie Rodgers, Liverpool University Press, 2025.
- ‘Colette eco-feminist avant la lettre ?’ in Redefining Womanhood: Agency, Voice, and Identity in Francophone Women’s Cultural Production, ed. Caroline Verdier, Ally Pugh, Veronique Desnain (Peter Lang, 2026).
- ‘”Une des grandes banalités de l’existence, l’amour…” (Colette): Romance in Women’s Writing’ in The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in French, ed. Shirley Jordan and Siobhan McIlvanney, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
- ‘Jacqueline Audry and the costume drama’ in French ‘Quality’ Cinema ed. Susan Hayward and Barry Nevin, Manchester University Press, forthcoming.

Working with the translator Helen Constantine, I am writing introductions and notes to new translations of Colette in the Oxord University Press World Classics series. I am also working on chapters on French feminism (for a new Cambridge history of France) and Belle Epoque feminisms (for a Routledge handbook on French feminism). In November 2026 I am one of the invited speakers to keynote at the conference Une Belle Epoque des femmes en litterature? at the Sorbonne in Paris.

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Primary investigator (PI)

• Middlebrow culture in Europe 20th/21st centuries

Student education

Research supervision