Dr. Helen Thaventhiran
Biography
I'm an Associate Professor in Literature from 1830-present (with particular interests in twentieth-century literature, criticism, philosophy), a Director of Studies in English at Robinson College, and a member of the editorial board of the Cambridge Quarterly.
For the English Tripos, I teach a range of papers including: Practical Criticism and Critical Practice; Part 1, Papers 7a/b (literature from 1830-1945 / 1870 to the present); Part II, Papers 2 (Tragedy), 11 (Prose Forms: 1936-56), 15 (Ethical Imagination), 16 (History and Theory of Literary Criticism).
Research Interests
Nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, especially modernism. The history, theory, and practice of literary criticism. Intellectual history and the history of philosophy.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I teach for the MPhil in English Studies, often for the research framework 'Literature and Philosophy', and supervise PhDs on a wide range of subjects (from dance notation to modernist fiction).
Connect with Helen
Publications
BOOKS
Philosophy's Margins: writing around pragmatism (forthcoming from OUP, 2026/7).
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and AI, edited with Sangam MacDuff (forthcoming from CUP, 2028).
William Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words and Related Writings, edited with Stefan Collini (OUP, 2020).
Radical Empiricists: meaning and modernist criticism (OUP, 2015).
SELECTED SHORTER PUBLICATIONS
'Think of the Iliad: mid-century language research (inc.)', Textual Practice (April 2026)
'No dose for it at the chemist: William James's Prescriptions', LRB (October 2024)
‘‘He was so poor that he did not even have a name’: fairy tales for Langer and Wittgenstein’, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Susanne K. Langer (2022)
'Things Ill-done and undone: T.S. Eliot's alibis', LRB (September 2022)
‘What’s the hook? (review of Felski's Hooked)’, LRB (January 2022)
'Passage Work: the rise of 'English'?', British Literature in Transition, 1900-1920 (CUP, 2021)
‘Feelings under the Microscope: new critical affect’, Cambridge Critical Concepts: Affect (CUP, 2018)
‘The Literary Criticism of T.S. Eliot’, chapter in The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot (CUP, 2016).
‘Well-versed: Wittgenstein and Leavis read Empson’, chapter in Wittgenstein Reading (De Gruyter, 2014).
‘War Lords in the Republic of Letters: Empson and Richards among the Mandarins’, Cambridge Quarterly, 41.1, March 2012
‘Empson and the Orthodoxy of Paraphrase’, Essays in Criticism, 61.4, October 2011
[Helen Crawforth], ‘Phantom Pentameters’, Essays in Criticism, 60.3, July 2010