School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies

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Jeremy Lane

Professor in French and Critical Theory, Faculty of Arts

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Teaching Summary

My teaching tends to focus on the culture, society and politics of post-war France. hence I teach on the first-year Contemporary France modules, deliver a module on French New Wave cinema at second… read more

Research Summary

My current research pursues two apparently quite distinct but, in fact, closely related strands. The first strand looks into the political, cultural, and social effects of contemporary… read more

Recent Publications

My teaching tends to focus on the culture, society and politics of post-war France. hence I teach on the first-year Contemporary France modules, deliver a module on French New Wave cinema at second year, and a year-long module on Ethnicity, Citizenship, and National Identity in Post-war France in final year.

I also teach French Language, currently on the core final-year language module.

I have taught sessions on Marxist Literary Theory on the French MA, as well as contributing seminars on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Baudrillard on the MA in Critical Theory.

Current Research

My current research pursues two apparently quite distinct but, in fact, closely related strands. The first strand looks into the political, cultural, and social effects of contemporary transformations in the French workplace. In this context, I have become interested in the work of André Gorz and of the group of thinkers collected around the French journal Multitudes. In September 2008, I co-organised an international conference on this topic, with my colleague John Marks, entitled Work in Postfordist France. A selection of papers from that conference was published as a special number of the journal Modern and Contemporary France, co-edited by John Marks and myself. In April 2016, I co-organised a second conference on this topic with Professor Sarah Waters (Leeds University). A selection of papers from that conference was published in August 2018, in a further special number of Modern & Contemporary France, which I co-edited with Professor Waters. In 2020, I published a book that represents the culmination of my work in this area: Republican Citizens, Precarious Subjects: representations of work in post-Fordist France (Liverpool University Press).

The second strand of research explores the work of Jacques Rancière and the bases of his critique of the social sciences. This has led to the publication of a series of book chapters and articles in journals such as Textual Practice and Nottingham French Studies. This research has culminated in the publication of the book: Rancière's Counter-sociology. Politics, History, Education (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)..

Past Research

My past research also pursued two broad strands.

My PhD thesis focused on the work of the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, attempting to contextualise his output in terms both of the particular philosophical and sociological traditions on which he drew and of the developments in French and Algerian society which his work analysed. My thesis was subsequently published as a monograph by Pluto Press in 2000. A second monograph, published by Routledge in 2006, looked into the practical implications and theoretical foundations of Bourdieu's political interventions, with particular reference to his outspoken criticisms of neo-liberal globalisation. By 2006, I had had quite enough of Bourdieu and was ready to move onto pastures new, namely...

An analysis of the reception of jazz in the French-speaking world between 1918 and 1945. This focused on two different but interrelated corpuses of works. The first corpus comprises the series of works of serious jazz criticism published in French over that period. The second corpus is made up of the poems and prose writings of those French intellectuals of colour who first encountered jazz in interwar Paris and who attempted to articulate the music to their various anti-racist and anti-imperialist agendas. This is the subject of my third monograph, entitled Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: music, "race", and intellectuals in France, 1918-1945. The book was published by the University of Michigan Press in their 'Jazz Perspectives' Series in July 2013.

School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies

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Nottingham, NG7 2RD

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