Professor Helen Brookman

Helen studied English Language and Literature at Wadham College, Oxford, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She undertook her doctoral research with the interdisciplinary Leverhulme Trust-funded Cambridge Victorian Studies Group; her dissertation title was: From the margins: Scholarly women and the translation and editing of medieval English literature in the nineteenth century.

Helen's career has been education-focused. She taught medieval English literature at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge for five years. She gained Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy with the Oxford Learning Institute in 2012 and received a Teaching Excellence Award from the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford in November 2013.

Helen moved to UCL in 2013 as a Senior Teaching Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching, where she worked particularly with Arts and Humanities and led a university-wide development programme for graduate teaching assistants. Helen joined King’s in June 2015.

Research interests

• Teaching and learning, especially creativity and interdisciplinarity in Arts and Humanities education
• Medievalism, particularly scholarly and literary translation
• The history of medieval scholarship

Helen has an academic and practice-based interest in education across the Arts and Humanities. An article co-written with Dr Julia Horn (Oxford Learning Institute), which is under consideration at Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, seeks to use a literary research methodology, close reading, to analyse student ‘texts’ (written work and teaching evaluations), to investigate her teaching and their learning.  She is currently involved in another pedagogic research collaboration with a fellow medievalist, Dr Liv Robinson (Brasenose College, Oxford), exploring the benefits of students engaging in creative translation activities.

Her cross-period ‘disciplinary’ research interests relate to the modern (particularly nineteenth-century) reception of Old and Middle English literature. Helen is interested in the post-medieval translation and editing of medieval English literature and in the history of medieval studies, especially women’s scholarship.   

Helen has work published, and forthcoming in Studies in Medievalism, Marginalia, The Journal of Victorian Culture, and an edited collection, Time Travellers: Victorian Perspectives on the Past.