Professor Jane Desmarais

Staff details

Professor Jane Desmarais

Position

Professor of English, Head of Department and Director of the Decadence Research Centre

Department

English and Creative Writing

Email

j.desmarais (@gold.ac.uk)

Goldsmiths Research Centres/Groups

Literary and visual decadence and Anglo-French cultural relations in the late 19th century.

Jane Desmarais is Professor of English and Head of the Department of English and Creative Writing. She is the Director of the Decadence Research Centre, Editor-in-Chief of Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, and Chair of the British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS).

Academic qualifications

  • Ph.D., ‘The Beardsley Industry’, Birkbeck, University of London 1995
  • MA, Literature and the Visual Arts, 1840-1940, Reading University 1986
  • BA Hons. English, Reading University 1985

Research interests

Jane's research is primarily focused on nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, specifically literary and visual decadence, and Anglo-French cultural relations at the fin de siècle. Her recent publications include Decadence and Literature, co-edited with David Weir (Cambridge UP, 2019), Monsters Under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present (Reaktion, 2018), Arthur Symons: Selected Early Poems, co-edited with Chris Baldick (MHRA, 2016), and Decadence and the Senses, co-edited with Alice Condé (Legenda, 2016). She is co-editor with David Weir of the Oxford Handbook of Decadence (Oxford UP, 2021) and is currently working on an edition of Decadent Plays, 1890-1930, with Adam Alston for Bloomsbury (2023).

She is a core member of both the Decadence and Translation Network and the Aestheticism and Decadence Network, and she is organiser (with Alice Condé and Jessica Gossling) of an annual series of international conferences and events on decadence, the most recent being Aesthetic Time, Decadent Archives in July 2019. She is an Honorary Member of the Italian Oscar Wilde Society and was recently elected to the Academia Europaea.

Jane also publishes in the fields of history and psychoanalysis. She has worked on the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford) and the journal Utilitas (Edinburgh UP). Her work in psychoanalysis focuses on two principal ideas: resistance and complementarity; and her most recent publication in this field is Presence of Mind in Neurophysiological Processes (with Lawrence Goldie).

Grants and awards

Funding overview:
Jane has received external grant funding from several organisations to support her work including: the AHRC, British Academy, ESSE, MHRA, Paul Mellon Centre of Studies in British Art

Publications and research outputs

Book

Desmarais, Jane H.. 2018. Monsters Under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present. London: Reaktion. ISBN 9781780239750

Desmarais, Jane H.. 2016. A Cultural History of Decadence. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 978-0745626000

Goldie, Lawrence and Desmarais, Jane H.. 2013. Presence of Mind in Neurophysiological Processes. Karnac Books. ISBN 9781855758858

Edited Book

Alston, Adam and Desmarais, Jane H., eds. 2024. Decadent Plays, 1890-1930. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781350171824

Desmarais, Jane H. and Weir, David, eds. 2020. The Oxford Handbook of Decadence. New York and London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190066956

Desmarais, Jane H. and Weir, David, eds. 2019. Decadence and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108550826

Edited Journal

Desmarais, Jane H., ed. 2018. Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 1(1).

Book Section

Desmarais, Jane H. and Weir, David. 2021. Taste: Savoring Decadence. In: Jane Desmarais and David Weir, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Decadence. New York and London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190066956

Condé, Alice. 2021. Contemporary Contexts: Decadence Today and Tomorrow. In: Jane H. Desmarais and David Weir, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Decadence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 96-114. ISBN 9780190066956

Desmarais, Jane H.. 2021. Touch: Unfeeling Decadence. In: Jane Desmarais and David Weir, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Decadence. New York and London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190066956

Article

Desmarais, Jane H.. 2021. Late-Victorian Decadent Song Literature. Victorian Literature and Culture, 49(4), pp. 689-710. ISSN 1060-1503

Desmarais, Jane H.. 2018. Voluptuous Interventionism: An Introductory Note from the Editor-in-Chief. Volupté: interdisciplinary journal of decadence studies, 1(1), i-vi. ISSN 2515-0073

Desmarais, Jane H.. 2017. Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows. Literary Encyclopedia, ISSN 1747-678X

Conference or Workshop Item

Desmarais, Jane H.. 2015. 'The Musical Aesthetics (‘such as it is’) of Arthur Symons (1865-1945)'. In: Arthur Symons: Writing Across Arts and Cultures. IUAV, Venice, Italy.

Desmarais, Jane H.. 2011. 'Memory and desire in Arthur Symons’ London Nights (1895)'. In: Decadent Poetics. University of Exeter, United Kingdom.

Digital

Gossling, Jessica and Condé, Alice. 2018. Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies.

Performance

Alston, Adam; Desmarais, Jane H. and Meth, Jonathan. 2021. Decadent Plays. In: "Decadent Plays", The Albany, London, United Kingdom, 10 November 2021.

Professional Activity

Desmarais, Jane H.. 2018. Editor-in-Chief of Volupté: interdisciplinary journal of decadence studies.