Professor Helen Hackett

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Email: h.hackett@ucl.ac.uk
External phone: 020 7679 3127
Internal phone: 33127

Education and Experience

Helen Hackett was educated at Manchester High School for Girls and the University of Oxford, where she gained a BA (1983), MPhil (1986), and DPhil (1990). While a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College (1988-90) she was co-founder and co-chair of the Women, Text and History seminar.

Helen has been at UCL since 1990 and is a Professor. In the 1990s she participated in the University of London course in Women, Writing and Feminism, and was on the steering committee of the London Renaissance Seminar. She was active in setting up the UCL MA in English: Renaissance to Enlightenment, and was its programme co-ordinator for a number of years.

From 2008 to 2010 Helen ran the MA in English: Shakespeare in History, and was a member of the steering committee of the London Shakespeare Seminar. Since 2009 she has been Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges (www.ucl.ac.uk/eme). She has made a number of appearances on BBC radio, and she reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and for academic journals.

Research

Helen’s principal publications have been on representations of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, early modern women writers, religious poetry, and early modern fiction. In her recent book on the entwined afterlives of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I she enjoyed exploring cultural history from 1700 to the present, including intersections between ‘high’ and popular cultures and between fiction and scholarship.

Helen is currently writing A Short History of English Renaissance Drama for I.B. Tauris. She is also researching the Aston-Thimelby circle, a Catholic literary network based in seventeenth-century Staffordshire. Several female members of the circle wrote engaging poems and letters which shed light upon women’s social relations and literary activity in this period. Their writings exemplify the making, exchanging, and preserving of manuscript poetry as significant social transactions, and illuminate the complex cultural position of English Catholics in the unsettled period before the Civil War.

As Catholics the Astons had international cultural connections, and investigating these has led Helen into collaborations with UCL colleagues in other departments. These have resulted in the establishment of the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, of which Helen is Co-Director. The Centre is concerned with all kinds of intercultural relations in the period 1450-1800, and brings researchers together in seminars, conferences, and research projects. Its website is at www.ucl.ac.uk/eme. Both Helen’s personal research and the general work of the Centre participate in the English Department research themes of Life Stories and Editions, in the UCL European Institute, and in the UCL Grand Research Challenge of Intercultural Interaction.

Helen would welcome graduate students with interests in the early modern period including court culture, women’s writing, representations of women, Catholic and other religious writing, romance, and Shakespeare (especially feminist approaches). She would also welcome those with interests in the cultural construction of Shakespeare and/or Elizabeth I across all periods.

Selected Publications

Books

Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths ( Princeton University Press, 2009)

Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance ( Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Writers and Their Work: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (British Council / Northcote House, 1997)

Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1995)

Articles and Chapters in Books

‘Suffering saints or ladies errant? Women who travel for love in Renaissance prose fiction’, Yearbook of English Studies 41.1 (Jan 2011), pp. 126-140

‘Dream-visions of Elizabeth I’, in Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night, ed. K. Hodgkin, M. O’Callaghan, and S. Wiseman (Routledge, 2008), pp. 45-65

‘The rhetoric of (in)fertility: shifting reponses to Elizabeth I’s childlessness’, in Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. J. Richards and A. Thorne (Routledge, 2007), pp. 149-171

Introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Stanley Wells (New Penguin Shakespeare, 2005)

‘The art of blasphemy? Interfusions of the erotic and the sacred in the poetry of Donne, Barnes, and Constable’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 28.3 (2004), pp. 27-54

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: Volume III: The Comedies, ed. R. Dutton and J.E. Howard ( Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 338-357

‘Historiographical review: dreams or designs, cults or constructions? The study of images of monarchs', The Historical Journal 44.3 (2001), pp. 811-823

‘Shakespeare’s theatre’, in Shakespeare: Texts and Contexts, ed. K. Ryan (Basingstoke: Macmillan / Open University, 2000), pp. 31-48

‘Gracious be the issue’: maternity and narrative in Shakespeare’s late plays’, in Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings, ed. J. Richards and J. Knowles (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 25-39

‘‘A book, and solitariness’: melancholia, gender and literary subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces 1580-1690, ed. G. McMullan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 64-88

‘The torture of Limena: sex and violence in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Voicing Women: Gender/Sexuality/Writing 1500-1700, ed. K. Chedgzoy, M. Hansen, and S. Trill (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 93-110

‘Courtly writing by women’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700, ed. H. Wilcox (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 169-189

‘Rediscovering shock: Elizabeth I and the cult of the Virgin Mary’, Critical Quarterly 35.3 (1993), pp. 30-42

‘“Yet tell me some such fiction”: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the “femininity” of romance’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760, ed. D. Purkiss and C. Brant (Routledge, 1992)