Louise Hardwick

I am a specialist of Francophone Studies and World Literature, with a particular interest in the global reception, adaptation circulation and translation of Francophone literature. I am also a published translator, with a growing body of work in Translation Studies. The majority of my research focuses on the postcolonial literature, film and visual culture of the Francophone Caribbean, and interrogates the international legacies of slavery, colonialism and postcolonialism. I have also published a substantial volume of comparative work which considers African, Canadian and Indian contexts.

I joined the University of Birmingham in 2010 as Lecturer in French, and was promoted to a personal Chair in 2018. To date, my research has been supported by two major funding awards as PI (approx. £150k each) from the AHRC and EC, and numerous smaller external and internal funding grants. 

I have held Visiting and Associate Fellowships at Emory University, Atlanta; TORCH, University of Oxford; and Homerton College, Cambridge. In 2015, I was a Visiting Lecturer at the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at the Georgia Institute of Technology (GeorgiaTech). I sit on the Board of the book series Francophone Postcolonial Studies, and the Australian journal Essays in French Literature and Culture. I receive regular requests to act as an External Expert Reviewer for international grant and promotion applications, particularly by bodies in North America, Europe and South Africa, and undertake peer review for a wide range of journals.

I am the author of four books, comprising three monographs: Creole Cinema: Memory Traces (2025), the first study of Francophone Caribbean cinema in English; Joseph Zobel: Negritude and the Novel (2018), which makes the original argument that Zobel’s novels must be understood as experiments to create a more applied, working-class, everyday form of Negritude; Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean (2013), a comprehensive comparative study of the aesthetic and political engagement found in Francophone Caribbean childhood memoirs; and a sole-edited volume New Approaches to Crime in French Literature, Culture and Film (2009).

My most recent articles explore the recovery of a marginalised modernist 'middlebrow' woman writer and aviation pioneer, Louise Faure-Favier (2022); the relationships between the governance of human and natural populations, using the methodology of biopolitics (2014); and an extension of that work to propose the novel methodology of biopolitical ecocriticism (2016).

Prior to joining Birmingham, I held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Homerton College, Cambridge and completed my Undergraduate and Graduate Degrees at Trinity College, Oxford. At Birmingham, I am currently Programme Director of our MA in Comparative Literature and Critical Theories, for which I also serve as Admissions Tutor. I have held a number of administrative roles, most recently as cover School Head of Research for our large, multi-disciplinary School of LCAHM including REF preparations; I am also on the LCAHM REF Review team.

I am dedicated to the development of practical applications of my research with schools, community groups, libraries, SMEs and charities. For this aspect of my work, I am collaborating with local partners across the West Midlands, and also with international partners in the Caribbean and France. In summer 2008, in the final months of my D.Phil, I was a Tutor on the Oxford Sutton Trust Summer School, an access scheme for state school pupils. I was particularly keen to support the Summer School because I had attended myself – and had a wonderful week – in 1999. The Summer School encouraged me to become the first member of my entire family to go to university (I was also the first to stay in school after the age of 16).

I have published in the fields of Francophone Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Comparative Studies (particularly with a Caribbean focus), World Literature, Sexuality and Gender Studies, Ecocriticism, and Translation Studies. I work with students at Undergraduate and Graduate level, and postdoctoral fellows, on aspects of literature (including Translation) and/or visual culture that fall into one - or more - of those areas.

In the course of my international research, I work with academic and community partners in the UK, France, the Caribbean, the USA and Australia. I also make regular media contributions (to date, in Martinique, metropolitan France, the UK and Angola), and have attracted external funding in excess of £500k through large EU and AHRC awards. At Birmingham, I founded the FRANCOPOCO Network in 2010 to promote internationally significant research, and have to date hosted scholars from the Caribbean, the US and Europe.

My first monograph, Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean (LUP, 2013) is the first study to identify and trace the development of an important tradition of Francophone Caribbean childhood narratives from the early 1900s. I provide a ground-breaking analysis of the aesthetic innovations and political implications – particularly for the transmission of the memory of slavery – in this important and vast body of writing. This research was funded by two individual AHRC Funding Awards for MA and Doctoral study (2004-5; 2005-2008), and by an AHRC award for fieldwork in the French Caribbean (2007). It has become an established reference in the field, with over 1000 copies listed in University libraries across the world (WorldCat, 2023).

In my second monograph, Joseph Zobel: Négritude and the Novel (LUP, forthcoming), I propose an original new reading of that well-known - but often misunderstood - Martinican novelist. My study offers a radical new vision of Zobel, and sets out to change the way that the author is understood by scholars and students alike. This project was supported by the award of an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship (2014-2016). The project’s blog is: https://josephzobel.wordpress.com/ The monograph has in a relatively short time become an established reference in the field, with over 1000 copies held in University libraries all over the world (WorldCat, 2023).

As sole editor, I have also published a book on New Approaches to Crime in French Literature, Culture and Film (Peter Lang, 2009).

More recently, I have undertaken substantial EU-funded research into ‘biopolitics’, examining the governance of populations. For this, I guest-edited a special edition of the International Journal of Francophone Studies on ‘Race, Violence and Biopolitics’ (2014), with Alessandro Corio. That project’s blog is here: https://caribiolit.wordpress.com/.

Subsequently, during my AHRC ECLF, I extended this biopolitical line of investigation to consider the governance of the natural environment in a 2016 article published in French Studies, which is available to read online for free thanks to funding from the AHRC.

I have given keynote speeches, invited lectures and talks in English and French at events organized by the French Ministère des Outre-mer; Society of Francophone Postcolonial Studies; University of Oxford Francophone Seminar; University of Cambridge Modern French Seminar; Liverpool International Slavery Museum; University of Liverpool Post-Slavery ESRC symposium; Race In The Americas research network; Ottawa University; Laval University; Institut Français de Londres; Centre national de la recherche scientifique; Université Paris III - La Sorbonne nouvelle; Université Cheikh Anta Diop Senegal; Université Toulouse- Jean Jaurès; Salon du Livre Paris.

I have organised a number of international research events, conferences and workshops, at the University of Birmingham (Visiting Caribbean Scholar funded through University of London/ILACS in 2017; colloquium on Biopolitics in 2013; visit of Maryse Condé and Richard Philcox in 2010), Cambridge (2009) and Oxford (2007, 2008).