Dr Jade Elizabeth French

PhD (Queen Mary, London)

Pronouns: She/her
  • Lecturer in English
  • Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Research groups and centres

Publications
ORCiD Google Scholar
  • Personal website

    • Career history

    Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Loughborough University, 2024–2027

    • Vice-Chancellor’s Independent Research Fellow, Loughborough University, 2022
    • Research Associate, ‘Reimagining the Future of Older Age’, University of Stirling, 2021-2022 (PI: Dr Melanie Lovatt)
    • PhD, English, Queen Mary, University of London, 2016–2020. (Supervised by Professor Suzanne Hobson and Professor Morag Shiach)
    • MA (Distinction), The Contemporary, University of Kent, 2015
    • BA (First Class Honors), English, Queen Mary, University of London, 2013


    Jade specialises in twentieth-century literature, with an emphasis on modernism, women's writing, ageing studies, care, intergenerationality, and visual culture.

    Jade is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Loughborough (awarded 2024), working on the project ‘Emotion, ageing, and the care home in post-war British novels since 1948’. Her first monograph Modernist Poetics of Ageing: The Late Lives and Late Styles of Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and H.D. is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in Feb 2025.

    She joined Loughborough in 2021 as a Vice Chancellor’s Early Career Research Fellow, developing work on ageing studies and care. During this time, has was also awarded British Academy and Royal Irish Academy Knowledge Frontiers seed funding to collaborate with colleagues in the UK and Ireland on environmental humanities and ageing.

    Since 2017, Jade has also run a non-academic research project Decorating Dissidence with Lottie Whalen and Suzanna Petot, which explores the conceptual, aesthetic, and political qualities of craft from modernism to the contemporary. Inspired by this project, she uses creative methods across her research, teaching and public engagement. They have worked with the Young V&A, Guest Projects, Poet in the City (Poets in Vogue), and Glasgow Zine Library.  

    Jade has also appeared on BBC Free Thinking, and written for The Times Literary Supplement, Apollo Magazine, Wired, and CityMonitor amongst others.

    Jade’s Leverhulme funded project ‘Emotion, ageing, and the care home in post-war British novels since 1948’ examines how post-war British authors grappled with deep-rooted and complex feelings – from anxiety to aspiration – relating to care homes and ageing, in a period that promised healthcare ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

    Her monograph Modernist Poetics of Ageing: The Late Lives and Late Styles of Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and H.D. (Oxford University Press, 2025) examines three late modernist women’s writing. Drawing on their place within wider modernist networks, this monograph is primarily framed around work by Mina Loy, H.D. and Djuna Barnes, who are often thought of as the quintessentially youthful ‘modern woman’ of the 1920s. Taking a literary, ageing studies and cultural criticism approach, this monograph focuses on lived experience, as well as thematic representations of ageing in their work, to examine how each author grew older in the years 1940–1982.

    Research groups

    In 2023–2024, she co-led English’s Health Humanities research network with Sara Read and Claire O’Callaghan, organising an event funded by the British Academy Early Career Network on ‘Archives, Objects, Methods’ hosted at Loughborough’s Institute of Advanced Studies. In 2023, they co-curated a month-long exhibition ‘From Cradle to Grave’, showcasing health humanities research at Martin Hall, Loughborough. Jade also contributes to the Cultural Currents: Nineteenth to Twentieth Century research group, and is organising a forthcoming symposium on generations in literature with Sarah Parker.

    Research interests

    Modernism, post-war literature, ageing studies, narrative gerontology, visual cultures, care studies, craft and the decorative, arts-based methodologies.

    As an interdisciplinary researcher, Jade is interested in making connections between literary and cultural studies, visual arts, social sciences, and health humanities.

    Please get in touch if you would like to connect or collaborate on any of the above.

    Books

    Recent articles