Helen Kingstone joined Royal Holloway in September 2022, after previous temporary positions at University of Surrey, University of Glasgow and Leeds Trinity University.

Research interests

My research examines how we write the history of our lifetimes. My first book Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: memory, history, fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explains why narrating the recent past is always challenging, and shows how it was particularly fraught in the nineteenth century. The book brings together Victorian histories and novels to trace how these parallel genres responded to the challenges of contemporary history writing in divergent ways. 

My second book, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain: seeing the big picture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) compares two contrasting Victorian approaches to gaining an artificial overview on the present and the scale of modernity: the panorama and the compilation. It begins by examining the 360° panorama paintings used from the French Revolution onwards to represent recent historical events, and traces how panoramic overview was adopted in literary form by historians, novelists and poets. The book’s second half examines Victorian attempts to encapsulate the contemporary era through compilations, from  W. T. Stead's digested Review of Reviews, to ephemeral collective biographies, to the Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900), which was surprisingly full of very recent lives.

My other research interest is in memory, and how we use it to build narratives of our lifetimes. Studying Generations: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2024) is a book I have co-edited with Jennie Bristow with ten contributors, which you can read for free via Bristol University Press's open access platform. This grew out of my role as founding co-chair of the Wellcome Trust-funded Humanities & Social Sciences research network on 'Generations: what's in the concept and how best should it be used?'. Sociologist Dr Jennie Bristow (Canterbury Christ Church University) and I co-hosted workshops across 2019-20 to pool knowledge across disciplines, and to work out how this important but divisive concept can best be used in public discourse and by policy-makers. Here is our toolkit for 'Talking about Generations: 5 questions to ask yourself'.

I enjoy writing for and conversing with public audiences, and have appeared on BBC2 (‘Novels that Shaped our World’, 2019) and BBC Radio 4 (‘Ok, Boomer!’, 2020). I’ve written for The Conversation about what George Eliot’s 200^th birthday can tell us about generational divisions, and about panoramas being the nineteenth century’s virtual reality technology, and for History Workshop about why we need to move beyond linear histories.

Teaching

My teaching focuses on nineteenth-century literature. I teach on Victorian Literature (EN2212), Literature of the Fin de Siecle (EN2309), MA Victorian London (EN5831), MA Nineteenth-Century Novel (EN5837).

I currently supervise PhD projects on gendered temporality across Victorian and Modernist women writers, and on Victorians in video games. I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students on topics including the Victorian novel; temporalities; history and memory; life-writing; age and disability studies; generations and intergenerationality.

Affiliations

I am a Reviewing Editor for Journal of Victorian Culture. I am also a co-director of the Centre for Research on Ageing and Generations, at the University of Surrey, and a visiting research fellow there.