Skip to main content

Cities Research Team

A diverse group of academics and professional services staff lead the Centre for Researching Cities.

Dr Gillian Jein

Reader in French and Cultural Geography

Background

I am Reader in French and Cultural Geography at Newcastle University. My research explores how art and cultural production shape the ways cities are imagined and experienced by different actors (residents, institutions and cultural practitioners) most recently in the context of contemporary ecological crises. I try to trace how Modern representations of “nature” have helped produce the ecological crises of the present, and examine how contemporary artists and cultural practitioners frame responses to such crises. My recent work focuses on Paris and its suburbs, alongside community gardens and civic ecologies in the North East of England.


Originally from Ireland, and the first in my family to attend university, I studied at Trinity College Dublin (BA French & History), the Sorbonne, and New York University, before completing my PhD on urban travel writing at Trinity. These experiences of moving between languages, places and disciplines still inform my research and teaching, and may be responsible for my feeling a strong commitment to forms of learning that are rooted in place and lived experience.


Before joining Newcastle in 2018, I taught at Bangor University. I was promoted to Reader in 2023 and served as Director of Impact and Engagement for the School of Modern Languages (2019–2025), as well as Theme Lead for “Defining and Experiencing Cities” at the Centre for Researching Cities (2020–2025). At present, I am a co-Director of the Centre for Researching Cities. In these roles, I aim to foster interdisciplinary and community-based collaboration around urban belonging, spatial justice and ecological care, and I am keen to work with partners interested in co-producing research, public engagement and practice-facing outputs.


As regards my personal research, at present I am in the throes of preparing a monograph on the visual ecologies of Grand Paris. Alongside this, with participants at The Comfrey Project in Gateshead, and in collaboration with artists, designers and community coordinators, I produced The Comfrey Almanac (a 144-page illustrated book) that explores the urban community garden as a site of resilience, for re-establishing rootedness through practices of social and ecological care, and as a platform for public-facing learning and local capacity-building. I think of this book as the public-facing instrument of my research and an attempt to bring this work into accessible, everyday practices built around actionable care.


I welcome enquiries from research candidates interested in the following themes/areas of modern and contemporary French & Francophone Studies: 

  • Cities, Urban Cultures, Urban Imaginaries, Urban Nature(s)
  • Travel and Migration
  • Visual Culture
  • Nature Writing
  • Travel Writing


EDUCATION

2008 Ph.D, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (supervisor Prof. David H.T. Scott)

2002 Diplôme d’Études Approfondies (D.E.A. / M.Phil equivalent), Sorbonne Nouvelle Université Paris III, France (supervisor Prof. Philippe Hamon)

2001 B.A. Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (double first-class honours in French and History, dissertation in both disciplines)


ACADEMIC TEACHING QUALIFICATIONS

2017 F.H.E.A., Bangor University, Wales (Fellow of the Higher Education Academy / Advance HE).

2010 F.L.E. (Stage de perfectionnement en Français Langue Étrangère / Teaching French as a Foreign Language), Université de Laval, Québec. 

2005 T.E.F.L. (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), The Language Centre of Ireland, Dublin. 


Research

I am currently developing two interrelated research programmes: Inventing Grand Paris and Grounding Cities, Growing Resonance.


Inventing Grand Paris was launched through an AHRC Early Career Research Leadership Fellowship (2018-2019). Working at the intersection of cultural geography and visual culture, the project examines the visual ecologies through which the Grand Paris transformation is imagined, contested and legitimised, with particular attention to the visualities and counter-visualities that accompany a Haussmannian-scale infrastructural reorganisation of the metropolis. The project was presented to Catherine Colonna during her visit to Newcastle University (January 2019) and contributed to the REF2021 evidence base for UoA26’s Environment Statement. In January 2020, I was invited to discuss the research at a British Academy roundtable on urban violence, positioning the work within wider policy-relevant debates on metropolitan inequality, security, and public space. To date, the research has generated peer-reviewed outputs (an article and two book chapters), alongside public-facing writing, including three historical vignettes for the bestselling 30-Second Paris volume (2018). I am currently developing a monograph from this programme, which brings these strands together to articulate how cultural production mediates contested urban transitions. The project has also supported a creative research practice: in collaboration with digital and soundscape artists, I co-produced the poetic documentary Line 16 (2019), exploring the affective and anticipatory dimensions of then-speculative metro sites across Seine-Saint-Denis.


The second programme, Grounding Cities, Growing Resonance, emerged during the pandemic, when restrictions prompted a shift toward applying research questions to sites closer to home, while maintaining a translocal perspective that links Grand Paris to UK urban ecologies. In 2021, with a colleague at DCU, I convened partners for a public-facing workshop on urban ecologies at Airfield Farm (Dublin). This work catalysed sustained engagement with North East partners, including Newcastle City Council’s Cities of Sanctuary initiative and, in particular, The Comfrey Project; a charity-run urban garden and allotment that uses ecotherapeutic approaches to support the wellbeing of refugees and people seeking asylum. In February 2022, this engagement was supported by a HaSS Research Institute Pioneer Award to deliver the co-creative workshop “Sowing Stories” with artist Sara Cooper and The Comfrey Project. Building on this, I was awarded a HaSS Knowledge Exchange Sabbatical (January 2023) with the charity, as well as funding from the North East Combined Authority and the ESRC, which enabled the co-production of The Comfrey Almanac, a collaborative publication that valorizes translocal and migratory perspectives on growing, seasonal practice and community resilience.


Alongside these research programmes, I contribute to academic leadership and sector-facing activity. I was co-founder of The Irish Centre for Transnational Studies and remain an external member of its executive board. I sit on the editorial board of The Journal of European Popular Culture and served as editor of the Irish Journal of French Studies (2011–2020). I have also contributed to public and policy-adjacent conversations through modest interventions with organisations including the BBC and the British Academy, and have delivered invited keynote lectures at international conferences (including Mobilities and Moorings in Belfast; UCD Humanities Institute’s The Transnational Neighbourhood; and the University of Oregon’s Urban Architecture Research Lab conference, Making Do in Urbanism and the Arts).


At Newcastle University, I am active across interdisciplinary research networks and, since May 2025, serve as Co-Director of the Centre for Researching Cities (NUCoRE). Within the NUCoRE I lead the Living Cities strand, which advances arts and humanities approaches to understanding cities as complex, relational systems, and supports challenge-led collaboration with external partners around just urban transitions.



I welcome enquiries from research candidates interested in the following themes/areas of modern and contemporary French & Francophone Studies: 

  • Eco-art
  • Urban Cultures
  • Visual Culture
  • Travel Writing



Teaching

UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING


  • I am module leader on the final-year UG course, Global France: Intercultural Encounters in French Literature and Film (FRE4020)


In this module, we explore French and Francophone perspectives on foreign cultures and environments, examining how such encounters have shaped understandings of the modern and contemporary world. Crossing diverse landscapes in literature, film and photography, students examine how travel representations not only reflect but also shape our understanding of the 'global' and of other cultures. Through lectures, seminars, close analysis and fieldwork, students gain an understanding of concepts like "otherness", "orientalism", "exotic", "endotic" and "relation", and critically examine travel and its influence on identity formation and deconstruction. By the end of the module, the aim is for students to have a comprehensive understanding of the historical evolution of intercultural relations in the French and Francophone world and their relevance to contemporary societal and ecological issues. Students emerge with enhanced linguistic skills, a refined critical eye, and a deeper appreciation for the transformative power of travel and travel representations as forms of world-making.


  • I am module leader on the first-year UG course, France and the Francophone World (FRE1006)
  • I teach a unit on the theme of marginality in the second-year UG module: Paris: Aspects of History and Culture (FRE2009).
  • I teach a unit on Spatial (In)justice on the final-year UG module, Social Justice in French Contexts (FRE4022)
  • I also teach French language at Level B (FRE1076)



DOCTORAL SUPERVISION


  • Completed (November 2025). Along with Prof. Shirley Jordan (SML), I supervised Dr Sophie Ellis, a Northern Bridge postgraduate recipient. Sophie's work explores Hospitality in contemporary French and Francophone visual arts practices. Sophie graduated with 'No corrections' and been nominated for the university's dissertation prize.


  • Along with my colleagues in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Profs. Simin Davoudi and Stephen Graham, I supervise Farhan Anshary, who is a NINE DTP recipient. Farhan's work explores Spatial Imaginaries of ‘City’ and ‘Non-City’ in the Jakarta City-Region.


I welcome enquiries from research candidates interested in the following themes/areas of modern and contemporary French & Francophone Studies: 

  • Eco-art
  • Urban Cultures
  • Visual Culture
  • Travel Writing


EXTERNAL EXAMINING

I have acted as external examiner on University of London’s Institute of Paris’s (ULIP) MA in Urban History and Culture (2019-2022) and as external examiner for the UG programme for French at MIC, University of Limerick (2021–2025).



 

Publications