Jade was awarded a presitigous Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellowship at Loughborough in 2022, developing new work on care, ageing and intergenerational relationships in post-war British literature. During this fellowship, she has also been 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.
In 2023–2024, she has co-led English’s Health Humanities research network, 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, she co-curated a month-long exhibition ‘From Cradle to Grave’ showcasing health humanities research at Martin Hall, Loughborough. Her monograph Modernist Poetics of Ageing is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
In 2021–2022, she was a Research Fellow on the project ‘Reimagining the Future in Older Age’ at the University of Stirling, working with PI Dr. Melanie Lovatt.
Previously, she completed her undergraduate English Literature degree at Queen Mary, University of London and an MA in The Contemporary at University of Kent. She returned to Queen Mary to undertake a PhD, which focused on examining how a ‘poetics of ageing’ is present in modernist texts by Mina Loy, H.D., and Djuna Barnes.
Jade co-runs the research project ‘Decorating Dissidence’, which explores the conceptual, aesthetic, and political qualities of craft from modernism to the contemporary. She uses creative methods across her research, teaching and public engagement.
Jade French specialises in twentieth-century literature, with an emphasis on modernism, women's writing, ageing studies, care, intergenerationality, and visual culture.
Her monograph Modernist Poetics of Ageing: The Late Lives and Late Styles of Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and H.D. (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) 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. By surveying literary texts, visual art, photography, life writing and archival material, this book explores the intersection of old age as lived and as well as written to argue that modernist late writing embodies the realities of ageing and transforms them through avant-garde aesthetics.
As an interdisciplinary researcher, Jade is interested in making connections between literary and cultural studies, visual arts, social sciences, and health humanities.
Research interests include: modernism, post-war literature, ageing studies, narrative gerontology, visual cultures, care studies, craft and the decorative, arts-based methodologies.
Please get in touch if you would like to connect or collaborate on any of the above.
- 2023: ‘Contradictory Late Styles in Djuna Barnes’s Poetic Cycles 1969–1982’ Poetics Today, 44 (1-2), 111–129 <doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10342113>
- 2023: ‘“Zoological Outcasts” and the Aging Other in Jean Rhys’s Late Short Stories’ in Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Growing Old amid Climate Change, ed. Nassim W. Balestrini, Julia Hoydis, Anna-Christina Kainradl and Ulla Kriebernegg, London: Lexington Books, pp. 57-72.
- 2023: ‘Understanding nuance and ambivalence in intergenerational relationships through fiction’ (co-authored with Melanie Lovatt and Valerie Wright), The Gerontologist, gnad051, <doi-org/10.1093/geront/gnad051>
- 2022: ‘Mina Loy: Commemorations by an Artist in Late Life’, Modernism/Modernity Print+ 7 (2), open access <doi.org/10.26597/mod.0243>.
- 2021: ‘“But with this I’m embodied”: H.D.’s Public Portraits 1913-1958.’ (co-authored with Sarah Parker), Feminist Modernist Studies, 4(1), 93–124. Link
- 2021: ‘Still Tickin’: Betye Saar, Ageing and Assemblage’. Women: A Cultural Review, 32(1), 2021, 70–85. Link
- 2021: ‘Ever-extending relationships: Bauhaus, Weaving and Contemporary Legacies’, MAI Journal (open access). Link
- 2021: ‘Women Modernists and the Decorative: An Introduction’ (co-authored with Lottie Whalen) in Women: A Cultural Review, 32(1), 1–7. Link