HELEN PALMER
Helen Palmer is a writer from northern England. She joined the department as a Senior Scientist in November 2020. After gaining her bachelor degree in English in 2006 at Glasgow University, she completed a Master of Arts in Contemporary Approaches to English Studies in 2007 at Goldsmiths, University of London, with a dissertation entitled 'Logic of Nonsense: Deleuze, Derrida and the implications of deconstructive play'. She completed her doctorate at Goldsmiths in 2012 with a thesis entitled 'A Manifesto for Nonsense: the Futurist Drive in Deleuze’s Poetics', supervised by Andreas Kramer and Alberto Toscano.
She worked as an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London between 2010 and 2015, and then between 2015 and 2020 as a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University London. Between 2014 and 2018 she was part of the Cost Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on 'How Matter Comes to Matter' directed by Iris van der Tuin and Felicity Colman. She is currently Section Editor of the journal Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research and Contributing Editor of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
As well as the monographs Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (2014, Bloomsbury) and Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (2020, Edinburgh University Press), she is the author of many articles exploring the relationship between literature and philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, Alice in Wonderland, feminist new materialist practice, speculative taxonomies and queer clowning. She is part of the performance duo Le Tomatique with Vikki Chalklin.
She is currently writing a novel called Pleasure Beach (2021, forthcoming) which is a feminist version of James Joyce’s Ulysses set in her seaside hometown of Blackpool, north-west England. She has performed excerpts from this ongoing project internationally.
