Mailing List


Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

Where do anthropology and archaeology meet? Do the study of humankind and the research of its material culture share a common approach? On what presuppositions do the disciplines rely? Where can the similarity of their methods be encountered? How did their conventions shape twentieth-century perspectives on the geographically and historically remote?   Both disciplines are born of a concept of distance which, at the same time as it establishes a limit for what they can comprehend, also assures that there is always enough space for a detached, unengaged, analytic gaze towards an other that exists in a distant past or distant place Such assumed detachment is fundamental to transforming fieldwork into theoretical analysis In order for such processes to take place, it’s necessary to find ways to reduce the whole into manageable samples Images, sounds, materials, notes are gathered and arranged in a single and unified physical area where they can be manipulated, enlarged, repeated, fragmented, combined: a table The table, this means of control and abstraction, might be the place where anthropology and archaeology meet Seated at the same table, professionals from both disciplines arrange the pieces in front of them as if they were playing a complex game whose rules have been defined over time   Francis Upritchard’s Traveller’s collection (2003) is a table with three shelves made of wood and marble, a depository and a display of objects of different natures, provenances, sizes, functions and shapes These colourful objects are carefully arranged: most of the smaller ones stand vertically while the larger items lie horizontally across the shelves This cabinet of curiosities is affiliated to the Renaissance-era Kunstkabinett, an encyclopaedic arrangement of objects without distinct disciplinary boundaries These pieces of furniture were often presented in chambers called Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer, in which objects relating to diverse aspects of biology, natural history, conchology, ethnography and archaeology, occultism, artistic expression, and geology were combined With their exuberant presentation of a variety of different items, the cabinets became a symbol of erudition and wealth, attesting to the elevated status of their owner while anticipating the space and function of

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

feature

Issue No. 16

Scroll, Skim, Stare

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 16

1.   This is an essay about contemporary art that includes no examples. It includes no examples because its...

fiction

Issue No. 3

Forkhead Box

Jeremy M. Davies

fiction

Issue No. 3

What interests me most is that Schaumann, the state executioner, bred mice. In his spare time. Sirens, ozone, exhaust...

feature

September 2013

A God In Spite of His Nose

Anna Della Subin

feature

September 2013

‘Paradise is a person. Come into this world.’ — Charles Olson   In the darkness of the temple, footsteps...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required