Dr Jasmine D Cooper

Degrees, Awards and Prizes

BA (Cantab) MA (UCL) PhD (Cantab)

• ‘Most Inclusive Teaching Practice’ 2019, CUSU Student-Led Teaching Awards.

Research Themes

I specialise in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature and visual arts. I have a particular interest in women’s writing, intersectional feminisms, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonial literature. 

My forthcoming monograph, ‘An End in Herself: Non-Motherhood in Contemporary French Women’s Writing’ (LUP) analyses the non-mother and narratives of maternal refusal in contemporary French women’s writing. In this project, I seek to transform the largely pessimistic portrayal and valuation of non-mothers globally. In this work, I contend that there is a strong correlation between those Francophone authors who write about non-motherhood and their status as either migrants, non-white, part of a marginalised group and/or queer. I look at texts by Fatou Diome, Négar Djavadi, Agnès Vannouvong, Linda Lê and Marceline Lordian-Ivens. 

My new research project is interested in rage in relation to contemporary francophone women of colour’s writing/cinema (Amandine Gay, Fatou Diome, Mame-Fatou Niang, Leïla Slimani, Faïza Guène, Fatima Daas, Alice Zeniter, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine). I assert that rage encompasses both a theme and a practice of intersectional feminist polemical writing/film: integral to the form, content and genesis of these works. I am interested in how rage informs an empowered and emancipatory artistic aesthetic and political praxis. I advance a view of rage as disruptive rather than destructive, part of a strategy of unmasking: crucial to the articulation of agency by marginal subjects; part of a process of unveiling and potentially healing historic trauma; and, finally, fundamental to an expansive, transformational worldbuilding project for marginal subjects.

I am currently co-editing a special issue on care in the contemporary for ‘Paragraph’ (forthcoming 2025); and I am co-organiser of the Women in French UK-Ireland 2025 conference.

Responsibilities 

In the MML faculty, I lecture on the final-year undergraduate paper FR12, on Leïla Slimani and Marceline Loridan-Ivens. I supervise students across all parts of the tripos (including FR1, FR6 and FR12).

I also lecture and supervise on the comparative paper CS5: The Body, specifically on the topic ‘Bodies, Race and Identity’. 

Other

I joined Girton College in 2023 as the Fairlie-Hutchinson Research Fellow in French. Previously, I was a Director of Studies and Bye-Fellow at Downing College (2021–2023), and Director of Studies (MMLL Part IA) and Praeceptor at Corpus Christi College (2020–2023).

I completed my PhD at Newnham College, Cambridge (2017–2020, supervised by Professor Emma Wilson), where I had also been an undergraduate, reading French and Spanish (2007–2011).

In between my undergraduate degree and doctorate, I worked in academic publishing, and completed my Masters in Comparative Literature at UCL part-time (2015–2017) whilst working fulltime. I attended state schools all the way through my education, in Harrow and Garston.