School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Academic & Teaching staff
Professor Diana Holmes
Professor of French
0113 343 3483
Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques
Diana Holmes studied at the University of Sussex and at the University of Paris III, before returning to Sussex to undertake a Doctorate on 'images of women in the inter-war French novel'. She taught at the Universities (then Polytechnics) of Wolverhampton and North London before joining Keele University as Senior Lecturer then Professor of French. Professor Holmes joined the French Department at Leeds in September 1999, which coincided with the award of a Leverhulme Fellowship. This funded a year's study leave spent researching and writing a monograph on the only woman writer of the fin-de-siècle Decadent movement: Rachilde: Decadence, Gender and the Woman Writer (Berg, 2002).
Prior to Rachilde, Diana Holmes published books on Colette (Macmillan, 1991) and French Women's Writing 1848-1994 (Athlone, 1996). In 2006 she published her study of the romantic novel, Romance and Readership in Twentieth-Century France. Love Stories (Oxford University Press)
A book entitled A Belle Epoque? Women in French Society and Culture 1890-1914 (co-edited with Carrie Tarr) also came out in 2006 (Berghahn). -
Diana Holmes has also published articles on many women writers including Colette, Rachilde, Elsa Triolet and Christiane Rochefort, on 1950s women's bestsellers and on popular romantic fiction at the turn of the last century. Her particular interest lies in the relationship between women's social and political situation, feminism, and the stories women write and read. Publications in this area include: 'Quel fleuve noir nous emportait... Sex and the woman reader at the fin-de-siècle' (Nottingham French Studies, 37.1, Spring 1998, pp. 51-70; Special Issue: French Erotic Fiction: Ideologies of Desire (Ed. J. Mainil)), 'The Politics of Romance: popular romantic fiction at the fin-de-siècle' in T. Unwin & K.Chadwick (Eds), France: fin(s) de siècle (Mellen Press, 2000), 'Colette, Beauvoir and the Change of Life' (French Studies, LIII.4, October 1999, pp. 430-43), and 'Ordinary Heroines: The Resistance Fiction of Elsa Triolet' (Berghahn, 1999, pp. 12-22; European Memories of the Second World War, (Ed. Peish, Burdett and Gorrara). Two recent conference papers - plenaries in London and Paris - have centred on the work of Canadian/French novelist Nancy Huston.
Diana's second research area is film. She has co-written a study of the cinema of François Truffaut (Manchester University Press, 1998) and co-edits the French Film Directors series in which this volume appeared. This series is large and growing thanks to its clear, accessible style and cogent reference to film theory. Over twenty volumes are already published in the series, and several more are in preparation. Diana has also written on the stardom of Brigitte Bardot ('A Girl of Today': Brigitte Bardot') in a forthcoming book on Stars and Stardom in Post-war France, of which she is also co-editor (with John Gaffney), and on the relationship between entertainment and ideology in film (Diana Holmes & Alison Smith (eds): 100 years of European Cinema: Entertaining Ideologies [Manchester University Press, 2000]). From 1998 to 2003 she was co-editor of the interdisciplinary French Studies journal, Modern & Contemporary France, and is now a member of the Editorial Advisory Board. In June 1999, she was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
In teaching, Diana Holmes offers modules in women's writing and French cinema. Courses include: 'The Seventh Art - Cinema in France', 'Ecrire et s'écrire: Women's writing in France 20th/21st centuries', and 'Gender, Sex and Cinema in France'. She is also co-director of the M.A. in World Cinema. She could offer research supervision in: women writers (late 19th and twentieth centuries, particularly popular and romantic fiction, Colette, Rachilde, contemporary novelists), French film (women directors, Truffaut, film and gender).