Dr Lise Jaillant

  • Reader in Digital Cultural Heritage

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.

At Loughborough, Lise Jaillant serves as programme leader for the PGT programmes in Communication and Media. She is also the programme leader for the Master in Social Science Research.

Career Highlights

  • Three monographs; eighteen articles; nine book chapters; two edited books; four journal special issues
  • 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: AHRC Follow On (2022-23), AHRC/ LABEX (2022-23), 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)
  • Member of several influential advisory boards – including at the Institute of English Studies, London and the Digital Preservation Coalition

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, Post45.  

Advisory board member and other academic service:

  • 2022: Reviewer for the Techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership
  • 2022: Member of the Final Awarding Panel for the BA Innovations Fellowships Scheme 2021-22
  • 2020 (ongoing): Member of the AHRC Peer Review College
  • 2017 (ongoing): Member of the Advisory Council, Institute of English Studies, U. of London
  • 2014 (ongoing): 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 (2022-2023), with the CO as the main partner.

Other activities include:

  • Curator, public exhibition on Carcanet Press, John Rylands Library, Manchester (2019 - 2020)
  • Curator, public exhibition “Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry,” Senate House, London (June 2019).
  • Cabinet Office (London), Invited Talk. “From Print to Digital: Preserving, Making Accessible and Using Archives of Digital Information” (Aug. 2018). Follow-up session “Learning from History,” July 2019.
  • Recorded interview as Wyndham Lewis expert, exhibition Wyndham Lewis: Life, Art, War, Imperial War Museum (IWM) North, Manchester (March 2017).
  • Dr Jaillant regularly reviews books for the TLS with a focus on publishing history and fine editions.

Lise Jaillant has a background in publishing history and digital humanities. Her core expertise is on literary institutions: she has published widely on the publishers that marketed the new literature of the early twentieth century to a broad audience. She also completed a transatlantic history of creative writing programmes, published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

In the past five years, Dr Jaillant has gained expertise 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:

(1) The new LUSTRE project (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 recently 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 student:

Nell Nixon: AHRC Techne funded doctoral student

Monographs

  • Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities (published by Oxford University Press in 2022).
  • Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant-Garde (Edinburgh UP, 2017). Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture series.
  • Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon – The Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 (New York: Routledge, 2014). Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace series.

Edited Books and Journal Issues

  • Editor, Archives, Access and AI (Transcript, 2022). Wrote the introduction (pp. 7-28) and one chapter (pp. 83-107). Published open access: https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac073 
  • 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).
  • Co-editor, Special issue “Global Modernism,” Modernist Cultures 13.1 (2018). Co-author of the introduction (pp. 1-13) with Alison E. Martin. Single author of one article (pp. 115-33).

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

  • “More Data, Less Process: A User-Centered Approach to Email and Born-Digital Archives.” American Archivist (accepted for publication). 
  • “Applying AI to Digital Archives: Trust, Collaboration and Shared Professional Ethics” co-authored with Arran Rees. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (published: 17 Nov. 2022). https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac073
  • "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
  •  “Diversity and Entrepreneurialism: PN Review, Feminism and the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1973-1990.” Twentieth-Century British History 32.4 (2021): 553-58. https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwab020
  •  “Invisible Poetry: Women, Ethnic Minorities and the Forgotten History of Carcanet Magazine.” Review of English Studies 72.306 (2021): 756–774. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaa096
  •  “After the Digital Revolution: Working with Emails and Born-digital Records In Literary and Publishers’ Archives.” Archives and Manuscripts 47.3 (2019): 285-304. https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2019.1640555