Professor Lise Jaillant

Before coming to Loughborough in February 2016, Lise Jaillant held positions at Newcastle University, the University of East Anglia and the University of Manchester.

She has an MA (Distinction) in Modern and Contemporary Literature from Birkbeck, University of London, and a PhD in English from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Career Highlights

• Four monographs; twenty-four articles; eleven book chapters; three edited books; seven journal special issues
• Women Poets, Male Publishers: Myth vs Market in post-1960's Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
• History of creative writing programmes published by Oxford University Press (2022)
• Second edited book Archives, Access and AI published in an open access edition (2022)
• Total research funding of more than £1M, including major grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Andrew W. Mellon and Humboldt foundations
• Recent grants: British Academy (2025), Archives & Records Association (2025), AHRC Follow On (2022-24), AHRC/ LABEX (2022-24), AHRC/ NEH (2021-23), AHRC/ IRC (2020-22), AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2018-20); British Academy Rising Star (2017-18)
• High-impact policy engagement, including invited talk and training session at the Cabinet Office (2018-19), internally-funded project (2021) and AHRC Follow On (2022-23) in partnership with the CO (2021)

Professional responsibilities

• Editorial Board member for Palgrave Material Modernisms series (2019-); Anthem Book History series (2016-)
• Reviewed full manuscripts (Columbia UP, U of Massachusetts P, Ashgate/ Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan) and journal articles for American Literary History, Archives & Manuscripts, Book History, ELH, Journal of Modern Literature, Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, Literature & History, PMLA, PLOS ONE, Post45.  

Advisory board member and other academic service:

• 2024: External reviewer, Dutch Research Council
• 2024: External reviewer, Swiss National Science Foundation
• 2024: External reviewer, Leibniz Competition
• 2024: External reviewer, Research Council of KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium)
• 2023: SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) Membership Secretary. Part of the Executive Committee. Responsibility for international membership strategy. Coordination of SHARP Liaison Officers.
• 2023: Member of the hiring committee for an Assistant Professor (“Maître de Conférences”) in English Studies, Université Angers, France.
• 2023: Member of the Final Funding Panel for the British Academy Talent Development Awards Scheme 2022-23
• 2023: Member of the Final Funding Panel for the AHRC Follow On scheme
• 2022: Reviewer for the Techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership
• 2022: Member of the Final Awarding Panel for the BA Innovations Fellowships Scheme 2021-22
• 2021: Vice Chair of the Digital Preservation Coalition Management and Governance committee
• 2020 (ongoing): Member of the AHRC Peer Review College
• 2017-2023: Member of the Advisory Council, Institute of English Studies, U. of London
• 2013-2023: SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) Liaison Officer to MLA
• 2017-19: Treasurer, British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS)
• 2017: Member of the Selection Committee, Modernist Studies Association (MSA) First Book Prize

External activities

In recent years, Lise Jaillant has developed collaborations with several museums/ special collections libraries, building on her expertise in publishing history in the digital age.

In 2021, she obtained EPG funding to conduct the project “Unlocking our Digital Past: Engagement with policy makers to improve the preservation, access and usability of born-digital archives” – in partnership with the Cabinet Office. This project led to the AHRC Follow On LUSTRE project (2022-2024), with the CO as the main partner.

Professor Lise Jaillant has a background in publishing history and digital humanities. She is an expert on born-digital archives and the issues of preservation/ access to these archives. Since 2020, she has been UK PI for four AHRC-funded projects on Archives and Artificial Intelligence. These international projects aim to make digitised and born-digital archives more accessible to researchers, and to use innovative research methods such as AI to analyse archival data.

(1) LUSTRE (Unlocking our Digital Past with Artificial Intelligence) in partnership with the Cabinet Office.

(2) EyCon (Visual AI and Early Conflict Photography) in partnership with French researchers;

(3) AEOLIAN (Artifical Intelligence for Cultural Organisations) with US partners;

(4) AURA network (Archives in the UK/ Republic of Ireland & AI).

• She has completed a project on UK poetry publishers, “Poetry Survival,” focusing particularly on the issue of born-digital archives. This project was funded by a major Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2018-20).
  
• These AHRC projects build on her British Academy Rising Star project (2017-18) to bring together archivists and scholars in order to find solutions to the issue of "dark" archives, closed to researchers for data protection or technical issues.

These projects aim to provide access to archival data to a wide range of "users" (researchers, members of the public) - without infringing the privacy of data producers and third parties.

Lise Jaillant’s classroom experience includes convening and teaching on a wide range of modules in Anglo-American literature and book history/ publishing at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Since 2020, she has convened and taught modules in Communication & Media, including modules on digital economies and cultural work. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Lise Jaillant welcomes PhD applications on any aspects related to her expertise – including digital humanities and cultural heritage. Please contact her if you would like an informal discussion about your ideas for a PhD.

Current PhD students:

• Nell Nixon: PhD funded by AHRC Techne
• Cara Xu: PhD funded by Loughborough
• Jixin Chen: PhD funded by Loughborough
• Qinqing Fu: PhD funded by China Scholarships Council

Monographs

• Women Poets, Male Publishers: Myth vs. Market in post-1960s Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).
• Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities (Oxford University Press, 2022).
• Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant-Garde (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture series.
• Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon – The Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 (Routledge, 2014). Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace series.

Edited Books and Journal Issues

• Editor, Special Issue “When Data Turns into Archives: Making Digital Records More Accessible with AI” (AI & Society, 2025).
• Editor, Special Issue “Using Visual AI Applied to Digital Archives” (Digital Humanities Quarterly 18.2, 2024). 5 articles by 15 contributors. Single author of the introduction. Co-author of two articles.
• Lead editor, Navigating AI for Cultural Heritage Organisations (UCL Press, 2025).
• Editor, Special Issue “Applying Innovative Technologies to Digitised and Born-Digital Archives” (Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage4, 2023). 295 pages, 15 articles by 50 contributors. Single author of the introduction (pp. 1-3). Co-author of one article (Article No.: 87, pp. 1-16).
• Editor, Archives, Access and AI (Transcript, 2022). Wrote the introduction (pp. 7-28) and one chapter (pp. 83-107). Published open access.
• Co-editor, Special Issue “Challenges and Prospects of Born-digital and Digitized Archives in the Digital Humanities” (Archival Science, 2022). Co-author of the introduction (pp. 285-91). Single author of one article (pp. 417-36).
• Co-editor, Special Issue “Born Digital” – Shedding Light into the Darkness of Digital Culture” (AI & Society: Journal of Culture, Knowledge and Communication, 2022). Co-author of the introduction (pp. 819-22) and one article (pp. 823-35).
• Editor, Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (Edinburgh UP, 2019). Wrote the introduction (pp. 1-12) and one chapter (pp. 154-72).
• Editor, Special Issue “After the Digital Revolution,” Archives and Manuscripts 47.3, 2019). Wrote the editorial (pp. 285-304).

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

• "AI to Review Government Records: New Work to Unlock Historically Significant Digital Records" co-authored with David Canning. AI & Society (published: 22 Feb. 2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02221-0
• "How Can We Improve the Diversity of Archival Collections with AI? Opportunities, Risks, and Solutions" co-authored with Olivia Mitchell, Eric Ewoh-Opu & Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja. AI & Society (published: 24 Feb. 2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02222-z
• “AI and Medical Images: Addressing Ethical Challenges to provide Responsible Access to Historical Medical Illustrations.” co-authored with Katherine Aske. Role: 1^st author. Digital Humanities Quarterly 18.2 (2024). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/18/2/000755/000755.html
• “Sensitivity and Access: Unlocking the Colonial Visual Archive with Machine Learning” co-authored with Jonathan Dentler, Daniel Foliard and Julien Schuh. Role: 2^nd author. Digital Humanities Quarterly 18.2 (2024). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/18/2/000742/000742.html
• “Are Users of Digital Archives Ready for the AI Era? Obstacles to the Application of Computational Research Methods and New Opportunities” co-authored with Katherine Aske. Role: 1^st author. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 16.4 (2023): 1-16 (Article No.: 87). https://doi.org/10.1145/3631125
• “Applying AI to Digital Archives: Trust, Collaboration and Shared Professional Ethics” co-authored with Arran Rees. Role: 1^st author. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38.2 (2023): 571-585. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac073
• “More Data, Less Process: A User-Centered Approach to Email and Born-Digital Archives.” American Archivist 2 (2022): 533-555. https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-85.2.533
• “How Can We Make Born-Digital and Digitised Archives More Accessible? Identifying Obstacles and Solutions.” Archival Science 3 (2022): 417-436. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-022-09390-7
• "How Can We Make Born-Digital and Digitised Archives More Accessible? Identifying Obstacles and Solutions.” Archival Science 22 (2022): 417-36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-022-09390-7
•  “Unlocking digital archives: cross-disciplinary perspectives on AI and born-digital data” co-authored with Annalina Caputo. AI & Society 37 (2022): 823-35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01367-x