Professor Shirley Jordan

Profile

Shirley Jordan is Professor of French Studies at Newcastle University and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing at the ILCS. She has published on 20th- and 21st-century women’s writing in French, on art and art criticism, on photography (including photobiography and contemporary city photography) and on experimental self-narrative across media. She has written chapters and articles on Marie Darrieussecq, Marie NDiaye, Christine Angot, Lorette Nobécourt, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Amélie Nothomb, Sophie Calle, Agnès Varda, Camille Laurens, and Chantal Akerman. She has also written on the art critical texts of Nathalie Heinich. Major publications include Contemporary French Women’s Writing (Peter Lang, 2004), Marie NDiaye: Inhospitable Fictions (Legenda, 2017), and the co-edited volumes Marie NDiaye: l’étrangeté à l’oeuvre (Septentrion, 2009), Watch this Space: Women’s Conceptualisations of Space in Contemporary French Film and Visual Art (Esprit Créateur, 2011), Cities Interrupted: Visual Culture and Urban Space (Bloomsbury, 2015) and a co-edited volume on form in contemporary French literature, What Forms Can Do: Attending to the Real in 20th and 21st Century French Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2020). Professor Jordan’s current research focuses predominantly on women’s experiences and representations of ageing and old age in France and beyond. She is working on several related projects, including a monograph on photographer Martine Franck for which she received a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (‘Ageing, Care and (In)visibility: The Forgotten Photography of Martine Franck’ 2022-23). She is Series Editor of the book series ‘Cultures of Ageing and Care’ with De Gruyter publishers.