معرفی
Helen F Thompson is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University within the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, affiliated with the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University and specializes in 18th-century British and transatlantic literature, philosophy, and the history of science.
- Education: B.A. in English and Chemistry (Amherst College), M.A. in The Writing Seminars (Johns Hopkins University), Ph.D. (Duke University)
Thompson's research interrogates intersections between literature, philosophy, and empirical science, focusing on how materialist thought shaped narrative forms and gendered subjectivities. Her work spans feminist critiques of social contract theory to analyses of corpuscular models in 18th-century novels.
Her publications explore themes such as secondary qualities in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, materialism in Haywood’s works, and Hobbesian political theory in Behn’s writings. Recent projects include a study of feminist utopian thought and a book on alchemy in Restoration England.
- Scientific Awards: E. LeRoy Hall Award for Excellence in Teaching (2016), Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll (2015)
Thompson co-organizes the Eighteenth Century Seminar at the Newberry Library and serves on the Advisory Board of Eighteenth-Century Studies. She teaches courses on second-wave feminism, utopian/dystopian sci-fi, and 18th-century literature from Boyle to Austen.
