Biography

Helen Thompson is Professor of English at Northwestern University. She completed a B.A. in English and Chemistry from Amherst College in 1989, followed by an M.A. in science writing from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 1991. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Duke University.

Collaboration with IHRIM Laboratory

Helen Thompson’s visit is part of the Northwestern French Interdisciplinary Group (FIG). At the Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM), she will share her work on the history and imagination of science and technology.

A specialist in British literature and the history of science in the 17th and 18th centuries, Professor Thompson is the author of Fictional Matter, a recent book that examines how chemical conceptions of matter shaped literary and identity thinking during that period. She is also conducting research on a commercial correspondence (1685–1699) between agents of the Royal African Company, through which she proposes an alternative genealogy of the epistolary form—one grounded not in bourgeois subjectivity, but in the material and social dynamics of transatlantic trade.

During her stay at ENS de Lyon, she plans to present several aspects of her research, attend IHRIM conferences, and consult Lyon’s archival collections on travel narratives and French trade in West Africa at the end of the 17th century. A fluent French speaker, she has previously conducted research in Paris and recently participated in a conference in Dakar.

Major publications

Books

• Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
• Reviews: Times Literary Supplement no. 5963 (July 2017); Choice 54: 12 (August 2017); Modern Philology 115: 4 (December 2017); Journal of British Studies 57: 1 (January 2018); Ambix 66: 1 (December 2018); The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats 51: 2 (Spring 2019); Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries 11: 1 (Fall 2019).
• Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Articles

• “Pernicious Science: Artifice and the Form of Narrative in Eliza Haywood’s Secret Histories.” Restoration 44: 1 (Spring 2020): 3 – 32.
• “‘It was impossible to know these People’: Secondary Qualities and the Form of Character in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54: 2 (Summer 2013): 153 – 68.
• “Secondary Qualities and Masculine Form in Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 24: 2 (Winter 2011 – 12): 195 – 226.
• “‘In Idea, a thousand nameless Joys’: Secondary Qualities in Arnauld, Locke, and Haywood’s Lasselia.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 48: 3 (Fall 2007): 225 – 44.
• “Betsy Thoughtless and the Persistence of Coquettish Volition.” JEMCS: Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 4: 1 (Spring/ Summer 2004): 102 – 26.
• “Charlotte Lennox and the Agency of Romance.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 42: 3 (Summer 2002): 91 – 114.
• “Plotting Materialism: W. Charleton’s The Ephesian Matron, E. Haywood’s Fantomina, and Feminine Consistency.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35: 2 (Winter 2002): 195 –214.
• “How the Wanderer Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu.” ELH 68 (Winter 2001): 965– 89.
• “Evelina’s Two Publics.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39: 2 (Summer 1998): 147 – 67.
• “From Metaphor to Matter: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Subject of Sight.” AnalectaHusserliana, Vol. XLII (1994): 185 – 201.