Dr Helen Charman, Clare

hmhc2@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I am an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English, where I teach primarily on the Lyric paper and the MPhil specialist seminar 'Free association and fragmentation: the case history and literary form'. I am also an Affiliate in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow and a doctoral supervisor at Glasgow School of Art. 

Before that, I was a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Clare College, and a Teaching Fellow in English Studies at Durham University. I have taught both English and Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University, Camberwell College of Arts, York St John University, and the University of Glasgow. I completed my BA and MPhil degrees at Emmanuel College, and my AHRC-funded PhD, George Eliot's Generative Economies, at Trinity Hall.

Research Interests

My research is broadly focused on the relationship between literary representation, feminism, social history—particularly history from below—and psychoanalysis, from the nineteenth century to the present day. My first book, Mother State, combines a variety of interpretative modes to consider mothering as an explicitly political and public act, from 1970 to the present. I'm working on two new projects: the first is another public-facing book, Hothouse Freaks, about the psychosocial history of the governess in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literature and culture. The second is an academic monograph, Deep Down Below the Memory, that considers the relationship between the psychoanalytic case history and narrative style, from George Eliot’s influence on Sigmund Freud to Lydia Davis’s relationship to Melanie Klein. I also have a particular interest in experimental modern lyric poetry.

I regularly write critical essays about literature, film and visual art for The White Review, Parapraxis, Art Review, Another Gaze, and Frieze, among others, and chair public events: recently, for example, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Wellcome Collection, Cambridge Literary Festival, and the Southbank Centre. I held an editorial residency at MAP magazine, funded by Creative Scotland, from 2020-2021. 

Selected Publications

Books:

Mother State: a political history of motherhood (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2024)