Jason Harding

Jason Harding is a world-leading scholar of modern literature and intellectual history. He has published seven books with major scholarly presses: three with Cambridge University Press, two with Oxford University Press, one with Faber and Johns Hopkins University Press, with further books contracted to Princeton University Press and OUP. He has published many research articles in periodicals including Cambridge Quarterly, Essays in Criticism, Modernism/modernity and paid journalism in The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and Financial Times Weekend. He is Associate Editor of The Explicator (founded in 1942) and is on the Advisory Board of Modernist Studies in Asia. He has appeared as a featured expert on the BBC and in a Sky Arts documentary. As a recipient of a large UK grant (total value £984,932), he edited a volume in the award-winning The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot praised in the Washington Post as “one of the most ambitious and revelatory scholarly achievements of our time.” He is working on a collaborative project with the Digital Humanities cluster at Cambridge University titled “Redefining Creativity in an age of Intelligent Machines”.

• PhD (King’s College, Cambridge)
• MA with Distinction (London University)
• PGCE (Sheffield University)
• BA starred 1^st Class Hons (UEA)

• Head and Professor, Department of English, Lingnan University (2025-)
• Head and Professor, Department of English, CityU Hong Kong (2023-2025)
• Professor, Department of English Studies, Durham University (2017-2023)
• Reader, Department of English Studies, Durham University (2009-2017)
• Visiting Fellow, School of Advanced Study, London University (2009-2012)
• Lecturer, Department of English Studies, Durham University (2006-2009)
• Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Åbo Akademi (2004-2006)
• Assistant Professor, Foreign Lang & Lit, National Chi Nan University (2002-2004)
• Acting Head, Foreign Lang & Lit, Feng Chia University (2001-2002)
• Assistant Professor, Foreign Lang & Lit, Feng Chia University (2000)
   

• Modernism
• China-West relations
• Cultural Cold War
• Digital Humanities

Books and edited volumes

• The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Volume 4, English Lion, 1930-1933 with Ronald Schuchard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press & London: Faber & Faber, 2021 [lii + 890pp].

• Modernism & Non-Translation with John Nash. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019 [230pp].

• The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016 [220pp].

• T. S. Eliot in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [420pp].

• Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010 [300pp].

• T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition with Giovanni Cianci, Foreword by Sir Frank Kermode. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 [230pp].

• The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 [268pp.].

Journal articles and book chapters

• “Metaphor and Meaning in Hart Crane’s ‘Voyages II’”, The Explicator (25 Dec 2025).

• “Eliot, Brexit and the Idea of Europe”, Eliot Now, eds. David E. Chinitz and Megan Quigley. London: Bloomsbury, 2024, pp. 195-206.

• “‘Going into Europe’: Encounter Magazine, European Union and the British Establishment”, Journal of European Periodical Studies 8:1 (Summer 2023), pp. 9-24.

• “William Empson’s Imaginative Engagement with China”, Cambridge Criticism: China and the World, ed. Cao Li. Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2022, pp. 344-60.

• “Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination,” Essays in Criticism 71:4 (October 2021), pp. 482-502.

• “‘Making Strange’: Non-Translation in The Waste Land,” Modernism and Non-Translation, eds. Jason Harding and John Nash. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 117-36. 

• “Fragments Shored against Ruin: Reassembling The Waste Land,” The Life of Texts: Evidence in Textual Production, Transmission and Reception, ed. Carlo Caruso. London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 191-203.

• “‘Our Greatest Asset’: Encounter Magazine and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, eds. Charlotte Lerg & Giles Scott-Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 107-25.

• “Unravelling Eliot,” The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, edited by Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 1-25.

• “The presence of Dante in T. S. Eliot,” Dante: Hell, Heaven and Hope – a journey through life and the afterlife with Dante, ed. Annalisa Cipollone. Durham: Institute for Advanced Study, 2017, pp. 87-90.

• “Later Eliot and Pound,” A History of Modernist Poetry, edited by Alex Davis & Lee Jenkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 398-416.

• “European Avant-Garde Coteries and the Modernist Magazine,” Modernism/ Modernity 22:4 (2015), pp. 811-20.

• “The Labyrinth and the Fountain: Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Leigh Fermor in Wartime Crete”, London Magazine (April-May 2015), pp. 17-25.

• “Changing Our Way of Being Wrong: T. S. Eliot’s Shakespeare” in Will the Modernist: Shakespeare and the European Historical Avant-Gardes, edited by G. Cianci and C. Patey. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014, pp. 39-57.

• “Tarantula’s Web: John Hayward, T. S. Eliot and Their Circle,” London Magazine (June/July 2013), pp. 95-101.

• “Signing the Vivid Air: Stephen Spender’s Journals,” London Magazine (October 2012), pp. 3-11.

• “Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and the King’s College Mandarins,” Cambridge Quarterly 41 (2012), pp. 26-42.

• “The Myth of Venice in the Decline of Eliot and Pound,” Venice and the Cultural Imagination, edited by Michael O’Neill, Mark Sandy & Sarah Wootton. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012, pp. 141-55 & 193-96.

• “T. S. Eliot’s Shakespeare,” Essays in Criticism 62 (2012), pp. 160-77.

• “Publishing” in T. S. Eliot in Context, edited by Jason Harding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. pp. 73-82.

• “Modernist and Modern Poetry” in The Cambridge History of English Poetry, edited by Michael O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 725-45.

• “‘The Just Impartiality of a Christian Philosopher’: Jacques Maritain and T. S. Eliot,” The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, edited by J. Heynickx & J. De Maeyer. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010, pp. 180-91.

• “The Idea of a Literary Review: T. S. Eliot and the Criterion,” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume 1, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, edited by Peter Brooker & Andrew Thacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 346-63.

• “The Right Accent: Conrad and the English Review,” Conradiana 41(2009), pp. 221-43.

• “Lehmann’s London,” London Magazine (December 2008), pp. 62-65.

• “Herbert Read and ‘The Psychological Method in Criticism’” in Re-Reading Read: New Views of Herbert Read. London: Freedom Press, 2008, pp. 180-87.

• “Modernist Poetry and the Canon” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, edited by Alex Davis and Lee Jenkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007: pp. 225-43.

• “Empson and the Gifts of China,” Some Versions of Empson, edited by Matthew Bevis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 84-103.

• “Tradition and Egoism,” T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, edited by Jason Harding & Giovanni Cianci. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 90-102.

• “The Englishness of the English Review” in Ford Madox Ford and Englishness, edited by Dennis Brown & Jenny Plastow. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, pp.137-45.

• “Eliot Without Tears”, Modernism/Modernity 13:1 (January 2006), pp. 917-24.

• “The Swan Song of Historical Romance: The Fifth Queen Trilogy,” History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings, edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004, pp. 111-20.

• “Experiment in Cambridge: A Manifesto of Young England,” The Cambridge Quarterly 27:4 (December 1998), pp. 287-309.

• ‘Hart Crane’s Voyage of Desire’, Keynote lecture, 9th International Symposium on Maritime Literature and Culture, Ningbo University, 4 July 2026.

• ‘Creativity in the Age of Intelligent Machines: What can literature do better than GenAI?’ Faculty of Arts research seminar, Lingnan University, 1 April 2026.

• ‘Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and the King’s College Mandarins’, Echoes between China and Britain Conference, 20 September 2025.

• ‘Translation and The Waste Land’, MSIA Conference, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, 26 June 2025.

• ‘The Value of a Humanities Education’, Xiamen University, 4 June 2025.

• ‘The Waste Land and Modernism’, keynote lecture, English Literatures and China conference, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 10 May 2025.

• ‘Evelyn Waugh’s Postcolonial Satire’, MSIA Conference, Hong Kong, 31 May 2024.

• ‘“Destroyer of Worlds”: Oppenheimer and the Bomb’, Hong Kong University, 1 February 2024.

• ‘Science and the Creation of Human Values’, THE Campus Live, Manila, 22 November 2023.

Articles

• ‘Jeep Girls and Everyday Encounters in Postwar China’, DotDotNews (13 August 2026).
• ‘Tragedy at the Hong Kong International Shakespeare Festival’, DotDotNews (29 June 2026).
• ‘Reflections on Antigone in Hong Kong’, DotDotNews (25 March 2026).
• ‘Mapping Hong Kong: City of Impermanence’, DotDotNews (5 February 2026).
• ‘Hong Kong’s Spoken-Word Poetry Communities’, DotDotNews (17 December 2025).
• ‘How universities can drive student success through digital humanistic perspectives’, Times Higher Education (22 January 2024).
• ‘Two Sides of Orwell”, Financial Times Weekend (5 August 2023).
• ‘Poetic Alchemy: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’, Financial Times Weekend (18 Oct 2022).

Interviews

• A Pathway to a Deeper Understanding of Global Realities’, South China Morning Post (25 June 2024).
• T. S. Eliot: The Search for Happiness: Sky Arts Documentary (2021).

• AHRC Research Grant: The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (£822,481).
• AHRC Research Grant: T. S. Eliot Project (£984,932).