Dr Helen Charman

My research is broadly focused on the relationship between literary representation, social history—particularly history from below—and psychoanalysis, from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular focus on depictions of reproductive experience. 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 currently preparing my doctoral thesis, George Eliot's Generative Economies: transactional maternal sacrifice in social realist fiction, 1853-1894, for publication as a monograph.

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