Professor of Literatures in French, Fellow of Exeter College
Research
Jane Hiddleston's research interests include francophone postcolonial literature, and literary theory. Her first book investigates notions of community in French philosophy and North African immigrant literature in French, and she has also published a study of the Algerian writer Assia Djebar, whom she situates in relation to contemporary French philosophy and postcolonial theory. In 2009, she published a student introduction to postcolonialism entitled Understanding Postcolonialism and, in 2010, a research monograph entitled Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory. In 2014 she completed a monograph on francophone intellectuals at the time of decolonisation, entitled Decolonising the Intellectuals: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire, and she also published an edited volume, together with Patrick Crowley, on Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form, for the new Liverpool University Press series on Francophone Postcolonial Studies. In 2017 she completed a monograph entitled Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition, published by Bloomsbury Press and her most recent book on Frantz Fanon and his engagements with literature, Frantz Fanon: Literature and Invention was published by Legenda in 2022. She is currently working on a study of Aime Cesaire for the Black Lives series at Polity Press.
Professor Hiddleston was a member of the Oxford-led Open World Research Initiative 'Creative Multilingualism', and she co-edited together with Wen-chin Ouyang Multilingual Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury 2021) as part of that project.
Teaching
French language and literature, especially nineteenth and twentieth century, francophone literature and literary theory. Special authors Stendhal, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Duras, Djebar. Special subjects on Race and Representation and Travel, Exile, Migration.
Graduate Teaching
Mst Key Questions in Critical Thought course, and Special Subject on Francophone Literature. I would be prepared to supervise Mst dissertations and DPhils in a range of subjects in francophone literature, postcolonial theory and literary theory.
Publications
Books:
Reinventing Community: Identity and Difference in Late Twentieth-century Philosophy and Literature in French (Oxford: Legenda, 2005)
Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool University Press, 2006)
Understanding Postcolonialism. Acumen, 2009.
Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory. Liverpool University Press, 2010.
Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014.
Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition. Bloomsbury, 2017.
Frantz Fanon: Literature and Invention. Legenda, 2022.
Edited Volumes:
Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form. Co-edited with Patrick Crowley.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011.
The Postcolonial Human. Special Issue of the International Journal of Francophone Studies, 15.3-4, 2012.
Abdelkebir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond. Co-edited with Khalid Lyamlahy. Liverpool University Press, 2020.
Multilingual Literature as World Literature. Co-edited with Wen-chin Ouyang. Bloomsbury, 2021.
Recent Articles:
‘Languages of Return: Aimé Césaire and Dany Laferrière’, Studies in Travel Writing 22.2, 2018: 180-198.
‘French Thought, Postcolonialism, and Islam: Jacques Derrida and Abdelkébir Khatibi’, in Irving Goh (ed.), French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK, Routledge 2019.
‘The North African Novel in French’, in Adam Watt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Novel in French, CUP 2020.
‘Poetry in the World: Césaire, Glissant, and the Language of Landscape’, in Christian Moraru and Nicole Simek (ed.), Francophone Literatures as World Literatures, Bloomsbury 2020.
‘Frantz Fanon: Freedom, Embodiment, and Cultural Expression’, in Colin Davis and Oliver Davis (eds.), Theory and the Subject of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Christina Howells, Legenda 2020.
‘The Artist’s Journey, or, the Journey as Art: Aesthetics and Ethics in Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux and beyond’
And
‘Introduction: Abdelkebir Khatibi at Home and Abroad’, in Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy (eds.), Abdelkebir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond, Liverpool University Press, 2020.
‘Abdellatif Laâbi, ‘la chair vive du poème’, Yale French Studies 137-138, 2020.
‘Writing in the Languages of the World: Language, Literature and World in Edouard Glissant’s Late Theoretical Writings’, in Hiddleston and Ouyang (eds.), Multilingual Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury 2021.