Diana Holmes
Diana Holmes is Professor of French at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom), and a founder-member of the feminist network Women in French-UK. She has published widely on French women’s writing and reading from the late nineteenth century to the present, ranging across the hierarchy of culture from ‘high’ to ‘low’ brow.
Her work includes studies of popular culture (e.g. Imagining the Popular: highbrow, lowbrow and middlebrow in contemporary French culture, with David Looseley, 2013) and books and articles on Colette, Rachilde, women novelists from the Belle Époque to the present, and the enduring popularity of romantic fiction. Her latest book Middlebrow Matters: Women's Reading and the Literary Canon in France since the Belle Époque (Liverpool University Press, 2018), won the American MLA Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, 2019. Her co-edited book Making Waves: French Feminisms and their Legacies 1975-2015 (with Margaret Atack, Alison Fell, Imogen Long) appeared with Liverpool University Press in 2020.
She also works on film and co-edits the Manchester University Press series French Film Directors, now approaching 50 volumes.
During her visit, Professor Holmes will give a public lecture entitled “Lost in a book – on the nature and value of immersive reading” as part of a study day on 15 June 2022 that focuses on French cultural studies. She is hosted by two 2021 Fellows: Dr. Isabelle Marc, Centre for research and experimentation on the artistic act (CREAA), and Professor Todd Reeser, Society, Stakeholders and Governments in Europe (SAGE).